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Onion Soup Maigre

A savory soup made from onions, celery, carrot, turnip, butter, water, potato flour, mace, white peppercorns, bread, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Onion Soup Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop and fry the onions, celery, carrot, and turnip in clarified butter.

  2. Pulp the roots through a sieve and add to boiling water thickened with butter and potato flour.

Season and finish

  1. Season with mace and white peppercorns.

  2. Alternatively, boil bread in the water instead of using potato flour, then strain.

  3. Add fried bread snippets and thicken with beaten egg yolks.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Form the sweet, savoury base of the soup as they soften and brown in butter.
Butter
Carries the frying flavour and adds richness to the soup.
Potato flour
Thickens the boiling water to give the soup body.
Egg yolks
Thicken the finished soup gently and add richness.
Bread
Soaks up liquid and adds body when boiled or fried into snippets.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if the soup boils after they are added, they can scramble and curdle, leaving the texture grainy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, carrot, turnip, butter, potato, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, carrot, turnip, butter, potato, flour. 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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