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Asparagus Creah Soup

A creamy soup made from asparagus pulp and ends, finished with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Asparagus Creah Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Cut off the ends of the asparagus for about two inches and boil the rest until tender.

  2. Rub the cooked asparagus through a coarse sieve and season the pulp with coarse sea salt.

  3. Meanwhile, boil the asparagus ends for about fifteen minutes, then drain them.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the butter and flour together, then stir into the boiling milk.

  3. Add the asparagus pulp to the milk mixture and boil for about ten minutes, stirring constantly.

Serve

  1. Place the drained asparagus ends in a soup tureen.

  2. Add the cream to the soup and pour it into the tureen without boiling again.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Forms the main body and flavour of the soup once rubbed into a smooth pulp.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries the asparagus flavour.
Butter and flour
Thicken the milk slightly, giving the soup body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the cream without boiling. Cream can curdle or separate when boiled, and boiling also thins its texture. Adding it off the heat keeps the soup smooth and rich.

Swap the asparagus

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Asparagusthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, cream. 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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