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Tomato Soup with Onions

A tomato soup flavored with onions, celery, carrot, and gravy, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Tomato Soup with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Fry the sliced onions in butter until brown, then remove them.

  2. Fry the tomatoes just until heated through.

  3. Combine the tomatoes, their juices, and the onions in a stew-pan.

Make the soup

  1. Add the sliced celery and carrot, then stew gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Add the gravy and stew for an additional 1.5 hours.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve to pulp the vegetables.

  4. Season with white pepper, coarse sea salt, and cayenne to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of 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.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Supply the main body, juice and tangy acidity of the soup.
Onions
Browning in butter builds sweetness and a deeper savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour when used to fry the onions.
Celery
Adds aromatic vegetable flavour as it softens during slow stewing.
Carrot
Adds gentle natural sweetness and body as it softens during stewing.
Gravy
Provides the main liquid and savoury depth that carries the soup.

The step that matters

Pass the mixture through a sieve to pulp the vegetables. Pulping breaks down the softened tomatoes, celery and carrot into a smooth purée. If skipped or only partly done, the soup stays chunky and its texture is uneven.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, tomato, celery, carrot, 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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