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Spring-Soup

A light vegetable soup made with chervil, celery, lettuce, leeks, parsley, butter, broth, egg yolks, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spring-Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the chervil, celery, lettuce, leeks, and parsley very fine.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan.

  2. Add the chopped vegetables to the pan.

  3. Simmer for a few minutes.

  4. Add the broth.

  5. Bring to a boil.

  6. Reduce until the soup is three pints.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix the egg yolks and cream together.

  2. Add the mixture to the soup just before serving.

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. Chervil + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chervil + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together148 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Chervil + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and add richness when gently heated into it.
Cream
Adds fat and smoothness, softening the soup's texture and flavour.
Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and carries flavour from the start.
Broth
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying all the flavours.

The step that matters

Add the egg yolk and cream mixture just before serving. Egg yolks curdle if they get too hot. Adding them off the boil, just before serving, lets them thicken the soup smoothly without scrambling.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chervil, lettuce, leek, parsley, butter, egg, cream):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chervil, lettuce, leek, parsley, butter, egg, cream. 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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