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Princes' Soup

A turnip soup made with veal stock and served with browned stale bread crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Princes' Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Cut the turnips into small balls the size of marbles using a vegetable cutter.

  2. Place the turnips in a stewpan and cover with veal stock.

  3. Simmer until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Add 1½ pints of additional clear veal stock and bring to a boil.

  2. Pour into a tureen.

Prepare and serve the bread crusts

  1. Slice stale bread into rounds about ¾ inch in diameter.

  2. Heat the butter in a sauté pan.

  3. Brown the bread rounds over the fire.

  4. Drain the bread on blotting paper to absorb excess grease.

  5. Serve the browned bread crusts with the soup, either on a separate dish or in the tureen.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Veal + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

  3. Turnip + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together831 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + vealtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,343 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenol (green, grassy).

  5. Veal + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the body of the soup as tender, mild-flavoured pieces.
Veal stock
Provides the savoury, gelatinous base that gives the soup its body and flavour.
Butter
Fat that browns the bread rounds, adding richness and golden colour.
Stale bread
Dry bread that crisps and browns well, serving as a crunchy garnish.

The step that matters

Browning the bread rounds. Bread browns quickly in hot butter, so the rounds can scorch before they colour evenly. Keep the heat controlled and watch closely, since the Maillard browning that gives flavour turns bitter once it passes golden.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Onionfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, 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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