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Clear Celery Soup

A clear soup made with celery, onion, butter, mace, pepper, salt, and vermicelli or pasta, served with toasted wholemeal bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Clear Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the onion.

  2. Fry the onion brown in the butter in a saucepan.

Make the soup

  1. Add 4 pints of water, chopped celery, mace, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cook until the celery is soft.

  3. Drain the liquid from the vegetables.

  4. Return the liquid to the saucepan.

  5. Bring to a boil.

  6. Add the vermicelli, sago, or pasta.

  7. Cook until the pasta is soft.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted wholemeal bread.

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

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Celery + pastatop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together331 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Onion + pastatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main flavour and body of the soup as it simmers in the water.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavour and browns it, adding richness to the base.
Onion
Browns in the butter to build a deeper, sweeter savoury base.
Vermicelli, sago, or pasta
Softens in the broth and thickens the soup slightly while adding body.

The step that matters

Fry the onion brown in the butter. Browning the onion develops sweet, roasted flavours through the Maillard reaction. Pale onion gives a flatter soup, while over-darkened onion turns bitter.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, onion, butter, pepper, pasta, 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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