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An Excellent Soup of Endives

A creamy soup made from boiled endives, butter, nutmeg, salt, sugar, broth, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 47 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

An Excellent Soup of Endives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endives

  1. Trim and wash the endives, removing the green and outer leaves.

  2. Blanch the endives in boiling water with a little salt for 10 minutes, then transfer to cold water.

  3. Drain and press out excess water, then cut off the roots.

Make the soup

  1. In a stew-pan, melt the butter and add the endives, nutmeg, salt, and sugar.

  2. Stir over low heat for 10 minutes with a wooden spoon.

  3. Add a ladleful of broth and simmer gently for 1 hour.

  4. Pass the mixture through a tamis to obtain a puree.

  5. Add 1 quart of broth to the puree.

  6. Just before serving, stir in the boiling cream or milk and a pat of fresh 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. Endive + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Endives
Form the main body of the soup and give it its bitter, vegetable flavour.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the soup a smooth mouthfeel.
Fowl or veal broth
Supplies the liquid base and savoury depth for the puree.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the cream or milk just before serving. Cream or milk that is kept boiling or held for long can scorch or separate, and it is added at the end so the soup stays smooth and creamy.

Swap the endive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, nutmeg, sugar, veal, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg, sugar, veal, 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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