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Celery Soup for Fast Days

A simple celery soup made with butter, flour, and water, served with fried bread slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Soup for Fast Days

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a pot over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and mix well, but do not brown.

Prepare the celery

  1. Boil the celery until tender, then mince it.

  2. Stew the minced celery in a little butter.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the flour and butter mixture to the celery.

  2. Pour in 8 cups of boiling water and season with salt, pepper, and parsley.

  3. Bring to a boil and serve with thin slices of bread fried in butter.

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

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

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

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps carry flavour through the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as a roux with the butter, giving it body.
Celery
Provides the main flavour and, once minced, most of the soup's texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour without browning. Flour cooked gently with butter thickens the soup smoothly. If it browns, it takes on a toasty, darker flavour and loses some of its thickening power.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, parsley, 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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