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Celery Soup

A light soup made with celery, white stock, ham, butter, and cream, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cut the white part of the celery into small pieces.

  2. Boil the celery in 4 pints of white stock with the ham and butter for 1 hour.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve and return the liquid to the pan.

  4. If desired, thicken with a little flour.

Finish and serve

  1. Carefully stir in a few teaspoons of cream.

  2. Serve with toasted bread and season with celery salt.

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

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

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Forms the main body and flavour of the soup as it simmers into the stock.
White stock
Provides the liquid base that carries the celery flavour through the soup.
Ham
Adds savoury depth to the simmering stock.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the soup.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the soup's flavour when stirred in at the end.
Flour
Thickens the soup to a heavier body if added.

The step that matters

Carefully stir in the cream. Cream can curdle or separate when it meets hot liquid that is boiling vigorously or too acidic. Adding it gently off the heat, with the soup no longer boiling, keeps it smooth and evenly blended.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, butter, cream, bread, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, cream, bread, 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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