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Soup

Potage À LA Bonne Femme

A stock-based soup with onion, butter, sorrel, lettuce, parsley, bread, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 317 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potage À LA Bonne Femme

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare 1 quart of stock and set aside.

  2. Prepare 12 thin pieces of bread, ensuring crust on one side, and dry them in the oven.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, melt 2 ounces of tinned butter and add the sliced onion.

  2. Cook the onion until half done, then add the sorrel, lettuce, and parsley.

  3. Stir in pepper, salt, and flour, and cook for 5 minutes.

  4. Add 2 teaspoons of pounded sugar and ½ cup of stock, and reduce to a glaze.

  5. Gradually stir in 1 quart of stock and let the soup simmer for 15 minutes.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Sorrel + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Sorrel + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel leaves
Adds a sharp, lemony acidity that brightens the soup's green flavour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and vegetables into a smooth, body-giving base.
Onion
Builds a sweet, savoury aromatic base as it softens in butter.
Pounded loaf sugar
Rounds out the sharpness of the greens and helps the soup reduce to a glaze.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the onion and greens and adds richness.

The step that matters

Reducing the stock and sugar to a glaze. If the mixture reduces too far it can scorch or turn overly thick and sticky, while too little reduction leaves the flavour thin. Watching the colour and volume keeps the glaze balanced.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sorrel, lettuce, parsley, pepper, flour, sugar):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Beetrootbetter flavor fit
  3. Leekbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sorrel, lettuce, parsley, pepper, flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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