Name: Portuguese Soup
Ingredients: 8 prunes; 1 quart stock; 3 leeks, cut into 2-inch pieces; coarse sea salt; pepper; strips of toast

Why it works: Leek and pepper work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 965 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Portuguese Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Soak the prunes in cold water overnight.
In the morning, drain the prunes and add the soaking water to a pot.
Add enough stock to make a quart and the leeks.

Simmer and serve

Simmer until the leeks are tender.
Add the prunes and season with salt and pepper.
Serve hot with strips of 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.

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.

Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together965 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes: Soften during soaking and simmering, then add body and a sweet, dark fruitiness to the soup.
Leeks: Cook down to tender pieces that give the soup its mild, savoury body.
Stock: Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying the flavour of the other ingredients.

“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.