Skip to main content
Main

Portable Soups and Spring Fruit-soups

A quick soup made by boiling portable soup with water, seasoning, and optional catsup, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Portable Soups and Spring Fruit-soups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil water in a pot.

  2. Add parsley or young onion to the boiling water for flavor.

  3. Stir in ground pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Add 1 to 1½ ounces of portable soup.

  5. Boil for a few minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted bread and a drop or two of catsup for color.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Portable soup
Concentrated stock that provides the main flavor and body of the broth.
Boiling water
Serves as the liquid that dissolves the portable soup into a broth.
Parsley or young onion
Adds a fresh, aromatic flavor to the broth.
Toasted bread
Adds crisp texture and a base to soak up the broth.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, bread):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes