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Mock Oyster Soup

A soup made from boiled onions, optional turnip, milk, butter, flour, and seasoned with pepper, salt, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Mock Oyster Soup

Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mock Oyster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil the onions in enough water to cover them until soft.

  2. If the onions are strong, add a turnip while boiling.

  3. Mash the cooked onions through a colander until smooth.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the mashed onions again in 1 quart of milk.

  2. Mix the flour with the butter, then stir the mixture into the soup.

  3. Let it boil thoroughly and season with pepper, salt, and mace.

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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Provide the main body and sweet, savory flavor of the soup when mashed smooth.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and gives it a creamy texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and smoothing the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when mixed with butter and stirred into the milk.

The step that matters

Let it boil thoroughly after adding the flour and butter. Flour must be heated long enough to cook out its raw starch taste and to thicken the milk evenly. Stirring the flour-butter mixture in well before boiling helps prevent lumps.

Swap the turnip

The recipe marks turnip as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, milk, butter, flour, pepper, mace):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, milk, butter, flour, pepper, mace. 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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