Skip to main content
Dessert

Cressey Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with carrots, turnips, celery, leeks, onions, split peas, veal stock, and watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cressey Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape the carrots clean and slice the red part thinly.

Make the soup base

  1. Put the carrots, water, turnips, celery, leeks, onions, and split peas into a stew pan.

  2. Stew all together until tender, adding stock to prevent burning.

  3. Rub the mixture through a tamis.

Finish and serve

  1. Add 5 pints of veal stock and blanched watercress to the pulp.

  2. Bring to a boil for 20 minutes, skim, season with salt, 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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Leek + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14 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

Red carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness and colour of the soup once puréed.
Split peas
Thicken the soup and give it body as they break down during stewing.
Veal stock
Supplies the savoury meaty base and liquid for the finished soup.
Leeks
Add mild onion-like aroma and savoury depth to the base.
Onions
Add aroma and savoury depth as they soften and sweeten during stewing.

The step that matters

Stewing until tender while adding stock. Stewing slowly with added stock keeps the vegetables and peas from scorching on the pan base. Scorched flavour carries through into the purée, and the vegetables must be fully soft so that rubbing them through a tamis yields a smooth, even soup.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, leek, onion, veal, watercress):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, leek, onion, veal, watercress. 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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes