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Soup Cressey

A carrot, onion, lettuce, and lentil soup thickened with bread crumbs and served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and lentils share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 51 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soup Cressey

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the soup

  1. In a stewpan, combine grated carrots, sliced onions, and cut lettuce with butter.

  2. Add lentils on top of the vegetables and pour in the stock.

  3. Simmer for 30 minutes, then add more stock to fill the pan.

  4. Boil gently for 1 hour.

  5. Stir in the crumbs of the French rolls and let them soak.

Finish and serve

  1. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  2. Serve with boiled rice in the tureen.

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. Lettuce + lentilstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + lentilstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together976 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Break down during long simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Carrots
Add sweetness and color, and help give the soup its body when sieved.
French roll crumbs
Soak up liquid and help thicken the soup further.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor from the vegetables.

The step that matters

Adding more stock after simmering. The lentils and vegetables absorb liquid as they cook, so the pan can run dry and scorch. Topping up the stock keeps the mixture loose enough to simmer evenly and to pass through a sieve.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, lettuce, butter, lentils, rice):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, lettuce, butter, lentils, 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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