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A Meagre Soup

A light soup made with butter, lettuces, beet leaves, celery, herbs, anchovies, and boiled water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Meagre Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the lettuces, white beet leaves, celery, chervil, pot marjoram, and chopped anchovies.

  3. Stew gently for about 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add boiling water and flour, then season with Cayenne pepper and salt.

  2. Boil for a few more minutes, then serve hot.

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 + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chervil + marjoramtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together38 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Marjoram + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Celery + marjoramtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together615 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying the herbs and vegetables in the pan.
Lettuces
Provides the leafy body and mild, green flavor of the soup.
Anchovies
Contributes a deep, salty savoriness that melts into the soup as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells with heat, giving the soup body.

The step that matters

Stew gently for about 30 minutes. Gentle heat softens the greens and lets the anchovies break down into the butter without scorching. Fierce heat can brown the butter and make the soup taste bitter.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, lettuce, chervil, marjoram, flour, pepper):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lettuce, chervil, marjoram, flour, 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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