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Soup

Flint Soup

A soup made with flints, water, onions, carrots, oatmeal or flour, pepper, salt, parsley, thyme, stale bread, and optional bones.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Flint Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the flints thoroughly and place them in a pot with water.

Cook the soup

  1. Add the chopped onions and carrots, and bring to a boil.

  2. Once the roots are tender, stir in the oatmeal or flour.

  3. Season with pepper, salt, parsley, and thyme.

  4. Add the torn bread and optional chopped bones, and simmer until well combined.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Softens and turns sweet and aromatic as it cooks in the broth.
Carrots
Adds natural sweetness and body to the soup.
Oatmeal or flour
Thickens the broth as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Bread
Soaks up liquid and adds body, helping thicken the soup.
Thyme
Adds a savory, herbal aroma to the broth.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green flavor to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stirring in the oatmeal or flour. Starch clumps when it hits hot liquid all at once. Stirring it in steadily and keeping the liquid moving lets each grain disperse and swell evenly, so the soup thickens smoothly instead of lumping.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, flour, pepper, parsley, thyme, bread, meat):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, flour, pepper, parsley, thyme, bread, meat. 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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