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Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup made with onions, butter, mace, salt, pepper, flour, stock, turnip, carrot, celery, green peas, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Julienne Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry the shredded onions in ½ tablespoon of butter until brown.

  2. Add mace, salt, pepper, and a spoonful of stock.

  3. Mix 1 tablespoon of flour with a little butter, then add the flour mixture to the onions and fry.

  4. Strain the mixture through a colander.

  5. Add more stock if desired.

Cook the vegetables and finish

  1. Boil the turnip, carrot, celery, and green peas in a little water until tender.

  2. Add both the water and the vegetables to the soup.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browning in butter builds a deep, savoury base flavour for the soup.
Flour
Fried with butter and stirred in, it thickens the soup and gives it body.
Butter
Carries the frying of the onions and flour, adding richness and browning.
Turnip, carrot, and celery
Softened by boiling, they add body, sweetness and vegetable flavour to the soup.

The step that matters

Frying the flour in butter. Flour must cook in the fat long enough to lose its raw taste and to thicken smoothly; if it is added without frying or stirred poorly, it can clump or taste floury.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, pepper, flour, turnip, carrot, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, pepper, flour, turnip, carrot, celery. 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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