Skip to main content
Main

Welsh Leek Broth or Soup

A soup made with leeks, chicken, celery, herbs, salt, and French plums.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Leek and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,093 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Welsh Leek Broth or Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leeks

  1. Blanch the leeks in boiling water for 5 minutes after trimming the heads and leaving some green leaves.

  2. Split each leek in half lengthwise and cut one half into 3 or 4 pieces.

Make the soup

  1. In a double stewpan, add the leeks to the whole fowl with the appropriate amount of water.

  2. Add chopped celery, herbs, and salt to taste.

  3. Boil slowly until the chicken is tender, then add the whole French plums.

  4. Keep the saucepan hot but do not let it overboil.

  5. After about 30 minutes, remove the chicken, cut it into pieces, and place it in a tureen.

  6. Pour the leek broth over the chicken, ensuring the leeks are partly in pulp.

  7. If the broth is too thick, add additional veal or chicken jelly.

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. Leek + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Leek + chickentop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  3. Celery + plumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Leek + plumtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Winter leeks
Give the soup its main flavour and, partly pulped, body and thickness.
Chicken
Provides the savoury broth base and the tender meat served in the tureen.
French plums
Add sweetness and a fruity note to the savoury broth.

The step that matters

Keep the saucepan hot but do not let it overboil. Boiling slowly keeps the chicken tender and the broth clear, while vigorous boiling toughens the meat and breaks up the liquid, making the soup cloudy.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (leek, chicken, celery):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against leek, chicken, celery. 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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes