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Creole Soup

A vegetable soup with onions or garlic, tomatoes, carrot, turnip, herbs, and boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Creole Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the onion or garlic and tomatoes in a pot over medium heat.

  2. Add the sliced carrot and turnip.

  3. Make a bouquet of herbs with parsley, celery, cloves, peppercorns, and bay leaf and add the herb bouquet to the pot.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and let cook slowly until vegetables are tender.

Finish the soup

  1. Mash the vegetables through a flour sieve or with a potato masher.

  2. If the soup is too thick, add hot water or broth to reach a creamy consistency.

  3. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper as needed.

  4. Stir in boiled rice before serving.

  5. If the soup is too thin, thicken with a little white sauce made with water and a pinch of baking soda.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

Tomatoes
Provide acidity and body as they cook down into the soup base.
Boiled rice
Adds body and thickness to the soup when stirred in before serving.
Baking soda
Neutralizes acidity from the tomatoes if the thin white sauce is used to thicken.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma as it softens into the base.

The step that matters

Let the vegetables cook slowly until fully tender. Slow cooking fully softens the carrot, turnip and tomato so they mash smoothly; undercooked pieces stay grainy and resist passing through the sieve.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, tomato, carrot, turnip, parsley, celery, rice):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, tomato, carrot, turnip, parsley, celery, rice. 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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