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Spring or Julienne Soup

A clear beef and vegetable soup with carrots, onions, turnips, celery, lettuce, leek, chervil, and optional asparagus or peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spring or Julienne Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Put the stock in a saucepan.

  2. Grind the beef steak and add it to the stock along with one chopped onion, one chopped carrot, and one chopped turnip.

  3. Heat over medium until just boiling, then remove from heat and let sit for 20 minutes with the lid off.

Strain

  1. Strain the soup through a thick warmed cloth into a basin slowly until clear.

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. Lettuce + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Leek + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together148 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steak
Gives the broth its meaty flavour as it simmers into the stock.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury depth to the broth as they cook.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour to the broth.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body to the broth.

The step that matters

Straining slowly until clear. Pouring too fast forces cloudy particles through the cloth, leaving the broth murky. Letting it drip slowly through a fine, warmed cloth lets the solids stay behind and gives a clear result.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, celery, lettuce, leek, chervil):

  1. Endivefits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, celery, lettuce, leek, chervil. 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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