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Thick Vegetable Soup

A thick soup made from French beans, lentils, peas, carrot, onions, stock, and served with butter and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and lentils match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 135 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Thick Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large saucepan, bring the stock to a boil.

  2. Add the sliced French beans, lentils, peas, chopped carrot, and chopped onions.

  3. Cook until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Crush the vegetables and pass them through a colander into another saucepan.

  5. Gradually add stock to thin the soup.

  6. Bring the soup to a boil for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with butter and bread crumbs.

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. Beans + lentilstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Lentils + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beans + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together949 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Lentils
Break down during cooking to give the soup body and a thick, hearty texture.
Peas
Add sweetness and soft body that thickens the purée as they cook.
French beans
Contribute fibre and structure that helps give the puréed soup its body.
Onions
Build savoury depth and aroma as their sugars soften during cooking.

The step that matters

Passing the cooked vegetables through a colander. Crushing and straining the tender vegetables creates the smooth, thick body of the soup. If the vegetables are not fully tender, they will not purée well and the texture will stay gritty.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, lentils, peas, carrot, bread, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, lentils, peas, carrot, bread, butter. 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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