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Spanish Soup

A hearty chestnut soup with onions, potatoes, turnips, thyme, vinegar, butter, and cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and turnip share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 46 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spanish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the chestnuts and vegetables in 2 quarts of water for 1.5 hours until tender.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve and return the soup to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the butter, vinegar, salt, and pepper to taste, then let it boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Sift in the cheese before serving.

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. Chestnut + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  4. Potato + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  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

Chestnuts
Starchy base that thickens the soup and gives it a mellow, sweet flavour.
Potatoes
Starch that breaks down during boiling and helps body the soup.
Spanish onions
Savoury aromatic base that adds depth and sweetness as they soften.
Turnips
Adds subtle earthy sharpness and bulk to the soup.
Butter
Adds fat for a rounder, richer mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the otherwise sweet, starchy flavour.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a sieve. Cooked chestnuts and potatoes are starchy and fibrous; pressing them through a sieve breaks them down fully, producing a smooth, even texture rather than a grainy one.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, potato, turnip, thyme, vinegar, cheese, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, potato, turnip, thyme, vinegar, cheese, 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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