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Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup with onions, turnip, carrot, celery, peas, and stock, seasoned with mace, salt, pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 onion base

  1. Fry the shredded onions in butter until brown.

  2. Add mace, salt, and pepper.

  3. Stir in a spoonful of stock.

  4. Mix flour with a little butter until smooth and fry the flour mixture with the onions.

  5. Strain the mixture through a colander.

  6. Add more stock if desired.

Add the vegetables

  1. Boil the turnip, carrot, celery, and peas in a little water until tender.

  2. Add the water and vegetables to the soup.

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 a deep, sweet flavour base for the soup.
Flour
Fried with butter, it thickens the soup and gives it body.
Butter
Fat that carries the frying flavour and helps the onions brown.
Turnip
Cut into fillets, it adds mild body and texture as the vegetables cook until tender.
Carrot
Cut into fillets, it adds mild sweetness and soft texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Frying the flour mixture with the onions. Cooking flour in fat for a while removes its raw taste and lets it thicken evenly. If it is not stirred well and mixed smooth first, it can form lumps that stay in the soup.

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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