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Soup

Soup Maigrt

A meatless vegetable soup made from onions, celery, spinach, cabbage lettuce and parsley simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 427 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Soup Maigrt

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a stew-pan and add the sliced onions.

  2. Shake the pan for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Add the celery, spinach, cabbage lettuces, and parsley.

  4. Shake the pan for 10 minutes.

  5. Pour in the water, add the bread crusts, pepper, mace, and optional beet leaves.

  6. Boil gently for 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, beat in the egg yolks and vinegar.

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. Spinach + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  4. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to cook the vegetables gently in fat, carrying flavour and giving body to the broth.
Onions
Sweeten and build the savoury base as they soften in the butter.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the soup when beaten in at the end, giving it a silky texture.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the mild, cooked vegetable flavours.

The step that matters

Beating in the egg yolks and vinegar. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if the soup is boiling when they are added. Adding them just before serving, off the boil, keeps the soup smooth and thickened.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, celery, spinach, lettuce, parsley, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, celery, spinach, lettuce, parsley, bread. 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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