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Potato Soup Maigre

A simple potato soup flavored with parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and a touch of sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Potato Soup Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and chop the potatoes.

Make the soup

  1. Add the potatoes, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, a gallon of water, a little coarse sea salt, and sugar to a pot.

  2. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the potatoes are pureed and the water reduces by half.

  3. Remove the potatoes and herbs, keeping them warm.

  4. Strain the soup through a fine sieve into another pot.

Serve

  1. Bring the strained soup to a boil and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  3. Potato + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + thymetop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,682 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Large mealy potatoes
Break down when simmered, giving the soup its thick, starchy body.

The step that matters

Simmering until the potatoes are pureed. Simmering must continue long enough for the starch-rich potatoes to break down fully and thicken the liquid. Stopping early leaves lumps and a thin soup, while overcooking can make the broth taste flat and dull.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, parsley, thyme):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, parsley, thyme. 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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