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Crecy Soup

A carrot-based soup made with butter, sugar, salt, herbs, and broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Crecy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Parboil the carrots in water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the carrots and stew them with butter, sugar, salt, and aromatic herbs.

Make the soup

  1. Blend the mixture until smooth and pass it through a sieve.

  2. Combine the puree with prepared broth and heat until warm.

  3. Optionally, add green peas or rice before serving.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Carrot + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Carrot + sugartop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,211 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

Carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness and colour of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel while the carrots stew.
Sugar
Enhances the natural sweetness of the carrots.

The step that matters

Stew the carrots gently with butter. Cooking the carrots slowly in butter softens them fully so the purée blends smooth. High heat can scorch the butter and leave the carrots tasting bitter or unevenly cooked.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. 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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