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Blackberry Soup

A sweet soup made with blackberries, butter, flour, water, cloves, and port, garnished with blackberries and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,150 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Blackberry Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in an enamelled saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour until slightly browned.

  3. Slowly pour in the water and add the blackberries and cloves.

  4. Simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  5. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve to remove the seeds.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the port and a few blackberries, then heat until the blackberries are cooked.

  2. Serve in a soup tureen, adding lemon juice if desired.

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. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Blackberries
Provide the main flavour, colour and body of the soup once simmered and sieved.
Flour
Browns with the butter and thickens the liquid into a light, smooth body.
Butter
Carries the flour's browning and adds richness to the soup.
Port
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour when heated through at the end.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour until slightly browned. Cooking the flour in butter until it turns lightly brown toasts it and removes raw starch taste. Stopping too early leaves a pasty flavour, while over-browning makes the soup bitter and dark.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, clove):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, clove. 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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