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Celery Soup

A soup made from boiled celery, milk, and flour, seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the chopped celery in a small amount of boiling water until tender.

  2. Heat the milk to boiling.

Make the soup

  1. Add the cooked celery and salt to the boiling milk.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with a little cold milk until smooth.

  3. Stir the flour mixture into the soup to thicken it.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Celery + milktop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main flavor and bulk of the soup as it softens in cooking.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and gives the soup a rich, creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the soup. Flour must be smoothed in cold milk first and then stirred into the hot soup. Starch granules that meet hot liquid unevenly clump together, leaving lumps, while a smooth slurry disperses and thickens the soup evenly.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour):

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour. 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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