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Cucumber Soup

A chilled cucumber soup made with cucumbers, onion, sorrel, consommé, stock, cream, and thickened with arrowroot or ground rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel and split the cucumbers, remove the seeds, and cut them into long slices.

  2. Sprinkle the cucumber slices with salt and let them stand for 30 minutes.

  3. Pour off the liquid from the cucumbers.

Make the soup

  1. Place the cucumbers in a stewpan with the sliced onion, chopped sorrel, and consommé.

  2. Stew for 1 hour or until the vegetables are soft.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve (tamis).

  4. Add the stock and cream thickened with arrowroot or ground rice.

  5. Season with salt and white pepper.

  6. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with sippets.

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. Sorrel + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cucumber + arrowroottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  5. Onion + sorreltop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together459 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Form the bulk of the soup and, once softened and sieved, give it its body and fresh flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Arrowroot or ground rice
Thickens the liquid so the soup becomes smoothly viscous when simmered.
Consommé
Supplies the main savoury liquid that cooks the vegetables and carries their flavour.
Stock
Adds further savoury depth and bulks out the liquid of the soup.

The step that matters

Thickening the cream with arrowroot or ground rice. Starch must be fully hydrated and gently heated to thicken; added to boiling liquid without being smoothed into cream first, it clumps and stays grainy, and overheating can thin it again.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, sorrel, cream, arrowroot):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, sorrel, cream, arrowroot. 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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