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Soup Jardiniere

A vegetable soup with celery, carrot, onion, tomatoes, leek, parsley, butter, broth, and jelly gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Soup Jardiniere

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stew pan, combine the celery, carrot, onion, tomatoes, leek, and parsley with the butter, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cover and cook on low heat for nearly 1 hour until the vegetables are soft.

  3. Add the broth and cold jelly gravy, then simmer for an additional hour or until ready to serve.

  4. Skim off any grease that rises to the top during cooking and save it for clarification.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 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

Butter
Carries the vegetables' flavour and softens them gently as they cook.
Leek
Adds a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma to the broth.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, giving the soup a brighter, richer flavour.
Broth
Forms the liquid base that the vegetables simmer in.
Cold jelly gravy
Adds gelatin and body, thickening the soup as it simmers.

The step that matters

Cooking the vegetables on low heat. Cooking gently on low heat softens the vegetables without browning them, keeping the soup's flavour clean and pale. Too much heat can scorch the butter and vegetables and turn the soup bitter.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, carrot, onion, leek, parsley, butter, pepper):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, carrot, onion, leek, parsley, butter, pepper. 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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