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Soup

Chestnut Soup

A soup made from boiled chestnuts, water, lemon rind, sugar, salt, white stock, parsley, and pepper, served with dry toast.

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

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chestnut Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Boil the chestnuts in salted water for 20 minutes, then peel and chop them finely.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the chopped chestnuts, water, lemon rind, sugar, and salt. Cook gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve back into the saucepan.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the white stock, chopped parsley, and pepper. Simmer gently for 20 minutes, stirring constantly.

  2. Pass the soup again through a sieve and serve with dry toast.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Chestnut + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together313 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Chestnut + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together381 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Form the body of the soup, giving it thickness and a mellow, starchy flavour.
White stock
Provides the liquid base and savoury depth for the soup.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness to balance the savoury stock and chestnuts.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aroma that lifts the rich chestnut flavour.

The step that matters

Rubbing the chestnut mixture through a fine sieve. Pushing the cooked chestnuts through a fine sieve breaks down their starch-rich cell walls into a smooth purée. Skipping or rushing this leaves a grainy texture that no later simmering can fix.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, parsley, pepper):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Chestnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, parsley, pepper. 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.

More chestnut soup recipes

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