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Tomato Soup

A simple tomato soup made with canned tomatoes, water, onion, garlic cloves, sugar, salt, pepper, butter, flour, and grated cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Tomato Soup

Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine tomatoes, water, onion, cloves, sugar, salt, and pepper in a pot.

  2. Stew until tender, then strain the mixture.

  3. Melt butter in a separate pan, stir in flour until smooth.

  4. Add strained tomato mixture to the flour mixture and boil until thick.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in grated cheese before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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 and acidic tomato flavour of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and smoothing the texture.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the butter into a smooth base.
Grated cheese
Adds savoury flavour and richness when stirred in at the end.
Sugar
Softens the sharpness of the tomatoes, adding gentle sweetness.

The step that matters

Stirring flour into the melted butter until smooth. Cooking flour in fat before adding liquid helps prevent lumps. If the flour is not fully blended in, lumps form and the thickening will be uneven.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Eggplantfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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