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Herb Soup

A vegetable soup made with lettuces, spinach, purslane, beet leaves, onions, parsley, cucumbers, spinach juice, butter, and boiled asparagus tops.

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

  1. Clean and chop the lettuces, spinach, purslane, beet leaves, onions, and parsley.

  2. Remove seeds from the cucumbers and slice them.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, combine all vegetables with the spinach juice and butter, then stir until the butter melts.

  2. Cover the stewpan and cook over low heat for 2 hours.

  3. Add boiling water to achieve desired thickness.

  4. Season with pepper and salt, then let the soup simmer for 1 hour.

  5. Add boiled asparagus tops cut into bits.

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

Butter
Melts into the vegetables, adding richness and a smooth, silky body to the soup.
Cucumbers
Add moisture and a fresh, mild flavour that lightens the cooked greens.
Lettuces
Provide bulk and body as they soften into the soup during long cooking.
Spinach
Adds deep green colour and savoury flavour, and thickens as it breaks down.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat for 2 hours. Gentle, covered cooking softens the fibrous greens slowly and keeps the butter from separating or scorching, so the soup becomes smooth rather than stringy or greasy.

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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