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Onion Soup with Water

A soup made from onions, flour or breadcrumbs, water, salt, pepper, and cold cooked vegetables, finished with fried bread pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Onion Soup with Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the onions and place them in a saucepan with the grease.

  2. Cook the onions, stirring, until they are half-brown.

  3. Sift in a little flour or fine bread-crumbs and brown well.

  4. Add 1 quart of boiling water, salt, pepper, and cold cooked vegetables.

  5. Fry small pieces of bread in grease until brown and add 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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Cooked until half-brown, they build the soup's savory, sweet flavor and color.
Flour or fine bread-crumbs
Browned with the onions, they add color and help thicken the soup slightly.
Bread
Fried until brown, it adds crisp texture and toasty flavor to the soup.

The step that matters

Browning the onions. Cooking the onions until half-brown caramelizes their natural sugars, which gives the soup its depth of flavor. Stirring prevents scorching, since burnt onions turn bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, bread. 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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