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Tomato Soup with Onions

A tomato soup flavored with onions, celery, carrot, and gravy, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Tomato Soup with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Fry the sliced onions in butter until brown, then remove them.

  2. Fry the tomatoes just until heated through.

Make the soup

  1. Combine the tomatoes, their juices, and the onions in a stew-pan.

  2. Add the sliced celery and carrot, then stew gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Add 3 pints of gravy and stew for an additional 1.5 hours.

  4. Pass the mixture through a sieve to pulp the vegetables.

  5. Season with white pepper, coarse sea salt, and cayenne to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted bread cut into shapes.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

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

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

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 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

Onions
Browning in butter adds sweet, deep flavour to the soup base.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the soup.
Celery
Adds savoury, aromatic depth as it stews with the other vegetables.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and body as it stews into the soup.
Gravy
Supplies the liquid and savoury richness that the vegetables cook in.

The step that matters

Stew gently after adding the gravy. A long, gentle simmer lets the vegetables soften fully so they break down when sieved. Boiling hard can scorch the base and make the flavour harsh.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, tomato, celery, carrot, pepper, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, tomato, celery, carrot, pepper, bread. 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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