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Spring Soup

A vegetable soup made with green peas, lettuces, onions, parsley, chervil, butter, eggs, water, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the vegetable base

  1. Combine chervil, lettuces, onions, parsley, butter, and 1 pint of water in a clean saucepan; simmer until tender.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Strain the vegetables and add two-thirds of the cooking liquid to the stock.

Finish the soup

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs with the remaining third of the liquid.

  2. Heat gently, then add to the soup along with the strained vegetables.

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. Chervil + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chervil + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  4. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 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

Green peas
Add body and a sweet, fresh flavour as the main vegetable in the soup.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the soup gently and add richness when heated slowly.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded, rich mouthfeel to the cooked vegetables.
Lettuces
Softens into the cooking liquid, adding body and a mild, delicate flavour.

The step that matters

Heat gently after adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by gently setting when warmed. If the soup gets too hot or boils after the yolks go in, they can scramble and turn grainy, so heat slowly and keep the soup below a simmer.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, chervil, lettuce, parsley, butter, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, chervil, lettuce, parsley, butter, egg. 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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