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Spring Soup

A vegetable soup made with carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, French beans, peas, bean cucumbers, asparagus tops, lettuces, sorrel, chervil, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Chop equal quantities of carrots, turnips, onions, and leeks.

  2. Stew the chopped vegetables in good stock.

  3. Add French beans, peas, bean cucumbers, asparagus tops, lettuces, sorrel, and chervil.

Finish the soup

  1. Stir in 1 teaspoon of white sugar and let the mixture reduce to nearly a glaze.

  2. Thicken some stock with green peas rubbed through a fine sieve.

  3. If desired, strain off the vegetables and serve asparagus tops in 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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Leek + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together73 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Beans + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together292 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 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

Green peas
Rubbed through a sieve, they thicken the stock and add body and fresh green flavour.
Leeks
Stewed with the other root vegetables, they build a sweet, savoury base for the soup.
White sugar
Added to the reducing mixture, it encourages browning and a glossy, slightly sweet finish.

The step that matters

Reducing the mixture to nearly a glaze. Reducing concentrates flavour, but if it goes too far the sugar and vegetable sugars can scorch or turn bitter, so it should stop at a light, glossy coating.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, leek, beans, peas, cucumber, asparagus):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Cauliflowerfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, leek, beans, peas, cucumber, asparagus. 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 spring soup recipes

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