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Thick Vegetable Soup

A thick soup made from French beans, lentils, peas, carrot, onion, and stock, served with fried stale bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and lentils match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 135 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Thick Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the vegetables.

  2. Put them to boil in a large saucepan.

  3. Crush the cooked vegetables.

  4. Pass them through a colander into another saucepan.

Make the soup

  1. Add stock gradually to thin the soup.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes.

Fry the bread and serve

  1. Cut the stale bread into different patterns.

  2. Melt butter in a frying pan.

  3. Fry the bread over low heat.

  4. Once fried, place the bread in a tureen.

  5. Strain the soup over the bread.

  6. Serve.

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. Beans + lentilstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Lentils + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beans + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together949 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Lentils
Break down when cooked to give the soup body and a thick texture.
Peas
Add body and sweetness when crushed into the soup.
French beans
Add bulk and vegetable flavour, thickening the soup as they break down.
Stale bread crumb
Fried bread pieces add a crisp, browned contrast to the smooth soup.
Butter
Fat that browns the bread, adding richness and aroma.

The step that matters

Passing the vegetables through a colander. Crushing and straining the cooked vegetables breaks down their starch-rich cell walls, which thickens the soup into a smooth body. Pressing too little leaves it grainy and thin.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, lentils, peas, carrot, bread, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, lentils, peas, carrot, bread, butter. 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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