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Tomato Soup

A simple tomato soup made with canned tomatoes, flour, butter, salt, sugar, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Tomato Soup

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub together the flour and butter with 1 tablespoon of tomato in a bowl.

  2. Bring the hot water to a boil in a pot and stir in the flour and butter mixture.

  3. Add the remaining tomatoes, salt, and sugar, and boil for 15 minutes.

  4. Rub the mixture through a sieve and serve with toast crumbs.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Tomato + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Tomato + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour blend smoothly into the soup.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body, flavor, and liquid of the soup.

The step that matters

Stir the flour and butter into the boiling water. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid without being worked smooth first. Rubbing it with butter and a little tomato beforehand coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly and thicken the soup without lumps.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar. 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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