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Bread Soup

A soup made with onion, turnip, water, French roll, milk, salt, pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bread Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Boil the onion and turnip in water until tender.

  2. Rub the vegetables through a sieve and return them to the cooking water.

Make the soup

  1. Add the broken French roll to the pot and boil for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  2. Gradually add milk until the soup reaches the desired thickness.

  3. Once boiling, stir in salt, pepper, and butter, then 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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

French roll
Breaks down in the hot liquid to thicken the soup and give it body.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it cooks, adding flavour to the broth.
Turnip
Cooks until tender and, once sieved, adds body and a mild earthy flavour.
Milk
Adds richness and creaminess and softens the soup's flavour.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the milk gradually. Adding milk to a very hot, starchy soup all at once can cause it to curdle or separate. Adding it slowly while stirring lets the milk warm evenly and blend into the thickened base.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, milk, pepper, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, milk, pepper, 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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