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Tomato Soup

A tomato soup made by peeling tomatoes, simmering with stock, and seasoning with pepper, salt, sugar, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Tomato Soup

Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Pour boiling water over the tomatoes to peel them.

  2. Cut the tomatoes, discarding the hard parts.

Make the soup

  1. Skim the fat from your soup stock and pour it off.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the stock and stew gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture, rubbing the tomatoes through a sieve back into the pot.

  4. Add pepper, salt, sugar, and butter rolled in flour.

  5. Boil for 10 minutes 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.

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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, flavor and liquid bulk of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when rolled in butter and stirred in.
Sugar
Balances the natural acidity of the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Add the butter rolled in flour. Flour clumps if added straight to hot liquid. Coating it in softened butter first lets it disperse evenly, so the soup thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar, butter, flour. 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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