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Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup made with onions, butter, mace, flour, stock, turnip, carrot, celery, green peas, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Julienne Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Shred the onions and fry them in butter until brown.

  2. Add mace, salt, and pepper, then stir in a spoonful of stock.

  3. Mix flour with a little butter until smooth, then add to the onions and fry together.

  4. Strain the mixture through a colander and add more stock as desired.

Add the vegetables

  1. Cut the turnip, carrot, and celery into thin strips, then boil with green peas until tender.

  2. Add the boiled vegetables and their water to the soup.

  3. For a clear soup, omit the flour and boil the onions with the vegetables instead.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

Onions
Browning in butter builds the savoury, sweet base flavour of the soup.
Butter
Fat that fries the onions and carries the aroma of the soup.
Flour
Cooked with butter into a roux, it thickens the soup and gives it body.
Turnip
Adds a mild, slightly sweet vegetable flavour and texture to the soup.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and colour, and holds its shape as thin strips.
Celery
Adds a fresh, aromatic vegetable flavour to the soup.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until brown. Onions turn brown through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, which create the deep, savoury flavour of the base. Pale onions give a flat taste, while over-browned ones turn bitter.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, pepper, flour, turnip, carrot, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, pepper, flour, turnip, carrot, 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.

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