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Potage a LA Pine Point

A French soup of butter, celery, onions, flour, stock, dumplings, hard‑boiled egg, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potage a LA Pine Point

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter with the finely chopped celery and onions in a stew pan.

  2. Cook for a few minutes until softened.

  3. Stir in the flour and cook until it turns light brown.

  4. Add stock gradually to achieve the desired thickness and bring to a boil.

Simmer and finish

  1. Let it simmer for one hour.

  2. Mix the egg, flour, parsley, and salt for the dumplings.

  3. Pass the mixture through a coarse sieve into the boiling soup.

  4. Stir in the chopped hard‑boiled egg and add sherry wine to taste.

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

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

  2. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Fat that softens the celery and onions and carries flavour into the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the butter, and browning it adds a toasted, nutty flavour.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup and sets its final thickness.
Egg
Binds the dumpling mixture so it holds together when passed through the sieve.

The step that matters

Passing the dumpling mixture through the sieve into the boiling soup. The mixture must be pushed through a coarse sieve into gently boiling liquid so it forms small pieces that cook through. Dropping it in as a lump can leave dense, uncooked centres.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, celery, flour, egg, parsley, sherry, wine):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, celery, flour, egg, parsley, sherry, wine. 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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