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Common Maigre Stock for Soups and Sauces

A stock made by boiling dry peas with carp's body, vegetables, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Common Maigre Stock for Soups and Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Wash the dry peas and boil them in water, adding more water as needed to prevent them from cooking too soft.

  2. Let the peas boil for several hours, replenishing with cold water as necessary.

Make the vegetable base

  1. In a separate pan, melt butter and sauté chopped carrots and sliced onions until half-browned.

  2. Add parsley roots, leeks, mushrooms, whole small onions, thyme, mint, and a bay leaf to the sautéed vegetables.

  3. Moisten the mixture with a little hot water and let it simmer over low heat for one hour.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Leek + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together360 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry peas
Break down during long boiling to give the stock body and a thick, earthy texture.
Butter
Fat that sautés the vegetables, carrying aroma and helping them brown.
Onions
Browning in the butter adds savoury sweetness and depth of flavour to the stock.
Carrots
Sweetness and aromatic depth as they soften and brown with the onions.
Carp's body
Adds savoury, gelatin-rich flavour to the stock as it cooks.

The step that matters

Keep the peas from cooking too soft. Peas that boil too long lose their shape and can turn mushy or cloudy. Adding water as needed keeps the liquid level steady so the peas soften gradually and the stock stays clear and well flavoured.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, onion, parsley, leek, mushroom, thyme):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, onion, parsley, leek, mushroom, thyme. 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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