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Creole Soup

A tomato-based soup with peppers, onions, macaroni, and horseradish, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Creole Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Brown the chopped peppers and onions in butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the can of tomatoes and brown stock; simmer for 20 minutes.

  3. Thicken the soup by rubbing together a little butter and flour, then add it carefully to the soup.

Serve

  1. In a tureen, place a little grated horseradish and vinegar.

  2. Add the boiled macaroni pieces to the tureen.

  3. Pour the soup into the tureen and serve.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter and flour
Thickens the soup by forming a roux that gives it body.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, giving the soup its base flavour.
Brown stock
Provides the main liquid and savoury depth of the soup.
Onions
Browning them builds sweetness and savoury aroma in the base.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with butter and flour. Rubbing butter and flour together and adding it gradually lets the starch disperse evenly. Dropping it in unmixed can cause lumps that do not smooth out.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, onion, butter, vinegar, horseradish, flour):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, onion, butter, vinegar, horseradish, flour. 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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