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Potato Soup

A creamy potato soup made with boiled potatoes and broth, seasoned with pepper and salt, served hot with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Potato Soup

Why it works: Potato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Potato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Steam or boil the potatoes until very dry, then mash them to a smooth paste.

  2. Gradually mix in the boiling broth.

  3. Pass the soup through a strainer and return it to the heat.

  4. Add pepper and salt, and let it boil for five minutes.

  5. Skim off any black scum that rises to the surface.

Serve

  1. If desired, fry the minced onions until light brown, add to the soup, and stew for ten minutes before serving.

  2. Serve hot with fried or toasted bread.

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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Mealy potatoes
Starch that breaks down into a smooth, thick body when mashed while dry.
Broth
Liquid that carries the potato into a soup and sets the savory base.
Onions
Adds aroma and savory sweetness when fried light brown first.

The step that matters

Mash the potatoes while very dry. Potatoes that are wet or undercooked turn gluey or thin when mashed and mixed with liquid. Drying them after cooking lets the starch stay mealy, so the broth blends into a smooth paste instead of a sticky one.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, pepper, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, 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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