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Celery Soup

A creamy soup made with rice, milk, celery, butter, salt, pepper, mace, eggs, and crisp bread dice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Boil the rice.

  2. Combine the boiled rice and milk in a pot.

  3. Finely chop the celery and add it to the pot.

Stew and season

  1. Cover and let it stew over boiling water until the celery is tender.

  2. Season with butter, coarse sea salt, white pepper, and mace if desired.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the eggs well in a tureen.

  2. Pour the soup into the tureen and top with crisp bread dice.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Rice + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,169 recipes

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

  5. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it body.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base of the soup.
Celery
Provides the main vegetable flavour and tender texture.
Eggs
Enrich and thicken the soup when beaten in before serving.

The step that matters

Beat the eggs well in a tureen. Eggs can curdle or scramble if they meet very hot liquid unevenly. Beating them well and adding the hot soup gradually helps them blend in smoothly and thicken the soup gently.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, celery, butter, white pepper, egg, bread):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, celery, butter, white pepper, egg, 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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