Skip to main content
Main

Tomato Soup

A tomato soup made with stewed tomatoes, peppercorns, cloves, onions, butter, sugar, flour, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Tomato Soup

Why it works: Tomato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,633 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Combine stewed tomato, hot water, sugar, cloves, and peppercorns in a pot.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Make the onion roux

  1. Fry the chopped onion in butter in a skillet for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

Combine and finish

  1. Stir the onion mixture into the boiling tomato mixture.

  2. Simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the soup.

  4. Serve with croutons.

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. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Clove + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Stewed tomato
Provides the main body, acidity and flavour of the soup.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavour and adds richness to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it mixes with the butter and hot liquid.
Chopped onion
Adds savoury, aromatic flavour to the soup base.

The step that matters

Add the flour and mix well. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly. Mixing it fully into the butter and onions first, then stirring into the boiling tomato, helps the soup thicken smoothly without lumps.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, flour, clove, onion):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, clove, onion. 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.

More tomato soup recipes

Cream 27Clear 14Creamed 10Creamy 8French 8with Rice 8 See all 632 →

You might also like

Tomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesTomato FrittersTomato Fritters23 recipesTomato PureeTomato Puree23 recipesMacaroni with Tomato SauceMacaroni with Tomato Sauce16 recipes