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Celery Soup

A creamy celery soup made with butter, milk, eggs, and cream, served with fried bread squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the celery pieces.

  2. Simmer for 5 minutes.

  3. Dilute the celery with 2 quarts of boiling milk.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and a little sugar.

  5. Stir and boil slowly for 30 minutes.

  6. Press the mixture through a sieve and return it to the saucepan.

  7. Boil again.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and mix in the beaten egg yolks, cream, and chopped parsley.

  2. Stir well without boiling.

  3. Serve with small squares of bread fried in butter.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Celery + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,331 recipes

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

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main flavour and body of the soup once pressed through a sieve.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the soup and give it a smooth, rich texture when heated gently.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, softening the flavour and giving a smoother mouthfeel.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and, with the celery, gives it a creamy body.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour when melted with the celery at the start.

The step that matters

Stir well without boiling. Once egg yolks are added, boiling can curdle them and make the soup grainy. Keeping the heat low lets the yolks thicken it smoothly.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, milk, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, egg, cream):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, egg, cream. 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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