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Celery Soup

A light soup made with celery, rice, milk, and veal stock or chicken broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rinse the rice.

  2. Add the rinsed rice to the milk in a pot.

  3. Place the pot on low heat to simmer.

  4. Grate the roots and white parts of the celery.

  5. Add the grated celery to the milk.

Cook and finish

  1. Cook until the rice is tender.

  2. Add more milk if necessary.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Combine the sieved mixture with the strained stock.

  5. Season with coarse sea salt and white pepper to taste.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Rice + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Celery + white peppertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together853 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Veal + celerytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Veal + ricetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,119 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens as it simmers, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Milk
Cooks the rice and celery, adding richness and a creamy texture.
Celery
Provides the main flavour and, once passed through a sieve, the soup's body.
Veal stock or chicken broth
Adds savoury depth and liquid to thin the puréed mixture.

The step that matters

Cook until the rice is tender. Rice must be fully softened before sieving, because undercooked grains stay gritty and will not pass smoothly through the sieve, leaving a grainy texture.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, milk, rice, celery):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, milk, rice, celery. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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