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Asparagus Soup

A vegetable soup made with boiled asparagus, water, flour, oil, milk, and seasoned with salt, served with toasted bread or crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Asparagus Soup

Why it works: Asparagus and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 566 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Asparagus Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the asparagus

  1. Boil the asparagus in 1 quart of water for 10 minutes, then pour off the water.

  2. Add 2 quarts of fresh water and boil for 20 minutes.

  3. Strain out the asparagus and mash it through a colander, then return the mashed asparagus to the pot with the water.

Make the creamy base

  1. Cream the flour with the oil.

  2. Stir the mixture into the heated milk.

  3. Boil the milk mixture for a few minutes, adding salt to taste.

  4. Pour the milk mixture into the asparagus and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve over toasted bread cut into dice or oyster crackers, garnished with parsley.

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. Asparagus + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together566 recipes

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

  2. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Asparagus + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Asparagus + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together363 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Provides the main vegetable flavour and, once mashed, the body of the soup.
Milk
Adds richness and a creamy, smooth body to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated.
Oil
Coats the flour so it blends into the milk without clumping.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the milk. Flour starch only thickens fully when heated, and adding it gradually while stirring keeps it dispersed so it does not form lumps. Boiling for a few minutes then lets the starch swell and set the soup's texture.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against asparagus, flour, milk, 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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