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Spring Soup

A light soup made with stock, lettuce, carrot, turnip, rice, and butter, served with toasted croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and prepare the vegetables: pare the turnip into thin ribbons and cut the carrot into thin slices, then into fine shreds.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the stock, castor sugar, shredded lettuce, carrot, turnip, and rice.

  2. Season with white pepper and coarse sea salt, then bring to a boil.

  3. In a separate bowl, rub the butter into the flour until well combined, then stir into the soup until dissolved.

  4. Boil the milk in another saucepan, then add it to the soup just before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup with small croutons of toasted bread.

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. Lettuce + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together976 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the soup and, with flour, helps thicken it for a smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the soup when combined with butter, giving it a smoother body.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a mild, rich flavour to the soup.
Rice
Adds body and starch, softening as it cooks into the soup.

The step that matters

Rubbing butter into flour before stirring into the soup. If the flour is not well combined with the butter, it can form lumps that do not dissolve. Working the fat into the flour coats the starch granules so they disperse smoothly when stirred into the hot soup.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lettuce, carrot, turnip, rice, butter, flour):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lettuce, carrot, turnip, rice, butter, 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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