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Cream of Potato Soup

A creamy potato soup made with potatoes, celery, onion, flour, butter, milk, and salt.

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

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cream of Potato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash, peel, and slice the potatoes.

  2. Cook the potatoes with the chopped celery and onion until tender, about 15 minutes.

Make the soup

  1. In a separate pan, make a white sauce by melting the butter, adding flour, and gradually stirring in the milk and salt.

  2. Mash the cooked potatoes and add them to the white sauce along with the cooking water.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve, reheat, and serve.

  4. If the soup is too thick, add hot milk to reach the desired consistency.

  5. Optionally, stir in chopped parsley 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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  4. Potato + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Break down when mashed to give the soup its body and thickness.
Butter
Fat that carries flavor and enriches the white sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a white sauce when cooked with the butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the white sauce and gives the soup a creamy texture.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savory flavor as it softens in the cooking water.

The step that matters

Make the white sauce without lumps. Flour must be cooked in melted butter before milk is added, and the milk stirred in gradually, so starch grains swell evenly into a smooth sauce instead of clumping.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, celery, onion, flour, butter, milk):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, celery, onion, flour, butter, milk. 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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