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Soup Garbure with Chestnuts, Polignac

A hearty French soup made with veal trimmings, chestnuts, onions, carrots, parsley, celery, bay leaves, pepper, and broth, topped with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Soup Garbure with Chestnuts, Polignac

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Peel the chestnuts.

  2. Pour boiling water over them to remove the inner skin.

Make the broth

  1. Line the bottom of a saucepan with fat pork slices.

  2. Add veal trimmings on top.

  3. Stick cloves into the onions.

  4. Add the onions to the saucepan along with carrots, parsley, celery, bay leaves, and pepper.

  5. Layer the chestnuts over the mixture.

  6. Cover with more fat pork slices.

  7. Moisten with broth to cover.

  8. Let simmer until well cooked.

  9. Remove the chestnuts.

Assemble and bake

  1. Split each in half.

  2. Layer them in a deep baking dish with toasted bread slices.

  3. Alternate layers of bread and chestnuts until the dish is full.

  4. Strain the cooking broth.

  5. Pour some over the dish.

  6. Bake until gratinated.

Serve

  1. Serve with a soup tureen of good consomme.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Chestnuts
Provide starchy, floury body and a mild sweet flavor that fills the soup.
Veal trimmings
Release gelatin and savory meaty flavor into the simmering broth.
Fat pork
Adds fat and savory richness to the broth and keeps the mixture moist.
Toasted bread
Soaks up broth in the layers, giving the dish a soft, absorbent texture.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and aromatic depth to the cooking broth.

The step that matters

Let simmer until well cooked. Long, gentle simmering lets the veal and pork release gelatin and flavor into the broth, and softens the chestnuts without breaking them apart.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, veal, onion, clove, carrot, parsley, celery):

  1. Beansfits about as well
  2. Lentilsfits about as well
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Chestnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, veal, onion, clove, carrot, parsley, celery. 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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