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Tomato Soup

A simple tomato soup made with onions, butter, flour, and spices, finished with salt and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Tomato Soup

Why it works: Onion and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,633 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. In a pot, melt the butter and sauté the onion until soft.

  2. Add the can of tomato, bay leaf, water, cloves, peppercorns, and sugar.

  3. Cook for 20 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture to remove solids.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix the flour with an equal amount of water until smooth.

  2. Add more water to the flour mixture until thin enough to pour.

  3. Stir the flour mixture into the strained soup.

  4. Add salt and baking soda, then heat until warmed through.

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

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

  2. Tomato + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor from the onion into the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when mixed with liquid and heated.
Tomato
Forms the main body and acidic, savory flavor of the soup.
Baking soda
Raises the pH, which mellows the tomato's acidity and deepens its color.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the soup. Flour clumps if added as a dry powder or as a thick paste, so it must be smooth and thin before it goes in. Stirring while adding helps it disperse evenly and thicken without lumps.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, flour, clove, 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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