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Scotch Potato Soup

A creamy soup of leeks or onions, celery, potatoes, and butter, thickened with flour and seasoned with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,093 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Scotch Potato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the leeks or onions and mix them with the celery.

  2. Cook the mixture in 2½ tablespoons butter for 6 minutes, tossing constantly.

  3. Add the mixture to scalded milk and cook for 45 minutes.

  4. Cook the potatoes in boiling salted water for 10 minutes, then drain them.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, melt the remaining butter.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons flour and stir to form a smooth paste.

  3. Dilute the paste with some of the milk from the vegetables, then combine it with the milk and vegetables.

  4. Add the potatoes to the mixture.

  5. Cover and cook until the potatoes are tender.

  6. Season with salt, pepper, and a few grains of cayenne.

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. Leek + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Leek + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Celery + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 recipes

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

  5. Leek + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Leeks or onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook slowly in butter, forming the soup's base flavour.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and enriches the soup with fat and a rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, body-rich soup when cooked into a paste.
Potatoes
Add starch and bulk, softening until tender to give the soup body.
Celery
Adds savoury, aromatic flavour as it cooks with the leeks or onions.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into a smooth paste before adding the milk. Flour clumps if added directly to liquid. Cooking it in butter and diluting it gradually lets the starch disperse evenly, so the soup thickens smoothly rather than lumpy.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (leek, celery, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against leek, celery, butter, flour, pepper. 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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