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Cock a Leekie Soup

A soup made with veal, bacon, leeks, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Cock a Leekie Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. In a large pot, melt the butter and add the veal and bacon.

  2. Add garlic, onions, salt, and pepper; cook until browned.

  3. Add ½ cup water and cook until a white glaze forms at the bottom.

  4. Pour in 5 pints of water and simmer for 30 minutes.

  5. Strain the stock, saving the veal pieces.

Add the leeks and serve

  1. Blanch the leeks in boiling water for 10 minutes, then drain.

  2. Add half of the leeks to the stock and cook until almost pulpy.

  3. Stir in the remaining leeks and the reserved veal; simmer for another 30 minutes.

  4. Serve hot.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  3. Garlic + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + leektop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Gives the stock body and rich, meaty flavor as it simmers.
Butter
Fat that carries flavor and helps the veal and bacon brown.
Bacon
Adds smoky, savory fat that deepens the flavor of the stock.
Leeks
Cook down until almost pulpy, thickening the soup and adding mild onion sweetness.
Onions
Browned with the meat to build sweetness and savory depth in the base.

The step that matters

Browning the veal, bacon and aromatics. Browning creates Maillard flavors that give the stock depth. Pale, steamed meat produces a flatter soup, so the pot should be hot enough to brown rather than grey.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, garlic, onion, pepper, leek):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, garlic, onion, pepper, leek. 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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