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Chicken Soup

A chicken soup made with rice, onion, celery, turnip, carrot, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Chicken Soup

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 ↓

Chicken Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Cut up the chicken and break the bones.

  2. Cook the chicken in 3 quarts of water until very tender, adding water as it boils away.

  3. When done, remove the meat and bones from the kettle.

  4. Pour the soup into an earthen dish and let it stand until cold.

  5. Remove every particle of fat from the stock and put it into a saucepan.

Finish the soup

  1. Wash and add ½ cup of rice to the soup.

  2. Fry the chopped onion, celery, turnip, and carrot in a little butter.

  3. Add the fried vegetables to the soup and boil slowly for 1 hour.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Slow cooking in water tenderizes the meat and releases flavor into the stock.
Rice
Absorbs liquid and thickens the soup as it cooks, adding body.
Onion
Frying in butter builds savory, aromatic flavor that carries into the soup.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and color to the soup as it simmers.

The step that matters

Removing the fat from the stock. Chilling the stock lets fat rise and solidify so it can be removed cleanly. Leftover fat left in the soup makes it greasy and heavy on the palate.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, rice, onion, celery, carrot, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, rice, onion, celery, carrot, butter. 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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