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Thick Spring Soup

A thick soup made from spring onions, carrots, lettuce, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel, mint, asparagus, butter, French rolls, mushroom trimmings, and broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 247 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Thick Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine spring onions, carrots, lettuce, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel, mint, and asparagus with butter in a stewpan.

  2. Sweat the mixture on a brisk fire for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  3. Add enough soaked French rolls to thicken the soup and a few mushroom trimmings.

  4. Pour in the broth and let it nearly boil, then skim off any foam.

  5. Pass the soup through a fine sieve and season with salt and sugar.

Serve

  1. Garnish with asparagus points or croutons before serving.

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. Chervil + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together247 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Spinach + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

French rolls
Soaked and squeezed, they thicken the soup body.
Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and carries flavour during sweating.
Broth
Liquid base that carries the vegetables and sets the soup's savoury depth.
Spinach
Leafy green adding colour, body and a green, earthy flavour.
Lettuce
Leafy green that breaks down during sweating, adding body to the purée.

The step that matters

Skimming the foam after the broth nearly boils. Foam is coagulated protein and impurities; removing it keeps the soup clear and clean-tasting. Letting it boil hard can cloud the broth and break the texture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, lettuce, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, lettuce, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel. 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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