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Herb Soup

A soup made from various greens, butter, spinach juice, and boiled water, simmered with pepper and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and purslane share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Herb Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Combine the lettuces, spinach, purslane, beet-leaves, onions, parsley, and cucumbers in a stewpan.

  2. Add the spinach juice and butter, stirring until the butter melts.

  3. Cover the pan and cook over very low heat for 2 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour in boiling water until the soup reaches the desired thickness.

  2. Season with pepper and salt.

  3. Let it simmer for 1 hour.

  4. Add boiled asparagus tops cut into bits 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. Spinach + purslanetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Purslane + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Purslane + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Spinach + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together355 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Silesia or cabbage lettuces
Provide the bulk of the soup and a mild, tender leafy body as they cook down.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the broth.
Cucumbers
Contribute moisture and a fresh, delicate flavour that softens during long cooking.
Spinach
Adds green colour, earthy flavour and leafy body to the soup.

The step that matters

Cooking over very low heat for 2 hours. Gentle, prolonged heat softens the leaves and vegetables fully and blends their flavours, while higher heat risks scorching the butter and sticking on the base of the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, spinach, purslane, parsley, cucumber, butter, pepper):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, spinach, purslane, parsley, cucumber, butter, pepper. 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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