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Tomato Soup

A soup made with tomatoes, water, salt, cloves, allspice, peppercorns, parsley, onion, butter, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Tomato Soup

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Simmer tomatoes, water, salt, cloves, allspice, and peppercorns for 1.5 hours.

  2. Fry parsley and onion in butter until browned.

  3. Add the fried mixture to the soup, bring to a boil, and strain.

Make the croutons

  1. Butter bread slices on both sides, cut into dice, and brown in the oven while the soup cooks.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the body and main flavor of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor when frying the parsley and onion, and helps the bread brown.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma once fried until browned.
Bread slices
Become crisp, browned croutons that add texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Browning the bread in the oven. Bread dice can burn quickly while the soup simmers. Buttered bread browns through the Maillard reaction, so it needs watching to reach golden rather than dark and bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, clove, allspice, parsley, butter, egg, bread):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, clove, allspice, parsley, butter, egg, 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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