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Soup Maigre

A light vegetable soup with butter, onions, celery, spinach, cabbage, lettuce, parsley, bread crusts, pepper, mace, egg yolks, vinegar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 427 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Soup Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Slightly brown the onions in the butter.

  3. Add the celery, spinach, cabbage, lettuces (cut small), and parsley.

  4. Stir for a few minutes.

Simmer and finish

  1. Pour in the water, crusts of bread, pepper, and mace.

  2. Boil gently for 1 hour.

  3. Beat the yolks of eggs, vinegar, and salt.

  4. Add the beaten mixture 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. Spinach + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  4. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the onions brown lightly in the pan.
Onions
Browning them in butter builds a sweeter, deeper flavour base for the soup.
Egg yolks
Beaten in at the end, they thicken the soup slightly and add richness.
Vinegar
Adds a little acidity that brightens the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg yolk mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if the soup is boiling hard. Stir the mixture in gradually and keep the soup below a boil so it stays smooth.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, celery, onion, spinach, lettuce, parsley, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, celery, onion, spinach, lettuce, parsley, bread. 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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