Skip to main content
Main

Consomme Knickerbocker

A clear chicken consommé flavored with barley, tomato, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, sugar, butter, salt, and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and celery 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 ↓

Consomme Knickerbocker

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skim and strain the chicken broth.

  2. Cut the onion, carrot, turnip, and celery into very small dice.

  3. Peel the tomato and cut it into small pieces.

Make the consommé

  1. Sprinkle all the vegetables with sugar and fry them in butter until slightly colored.

  2. Add the fried vegetables to the broth.

  3. Cook the barley separately, drain it, and add it to the soup.

  4. Season to taste with salt and white pepper.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Barley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken broth
Forms the liquid base that carries all the flavour of the soup.
Small barley
Adds body and a chewy texture to the clear soup.
Onion, carrot, turnip, and celery
Frying them in butter until lightly coloured builds savoury, aromatic depth.
Sugar
Helps the vegetables brown lightly during frying, adding gentle sweetness.

The step that matters

Fry the vegetables until slightly coloured. Browning the vegetables in butter develops savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, but overcooking them turns the flavour bitter and can cloud the clear broth.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, barley, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, sugar):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, barley, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes