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Spring Soup

A light vegetable soup made with stock, peas, beans, asparagus, lettuce, carrot, onion, herbs, beef, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 292 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the vegetables and scoop out small pea shapes from the carrot.

  2. Cook all the vegetables separately in salted water.

Make the stock

  1. In a pan, combine the stock, onion, herbs, minced meat, seasoning, and egg white.

  2. Whisk until it boils, then simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture and reheat.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the prepared vegetables and serve.

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 + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together292 recipes

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

  2. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

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

  3. Asparagus + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together313 recipes

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

  4. Peas + asparagustop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together808 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Clarifies the stock by collecting fine particles as it heats, leaving a clearer broth.
Gravy beef
Adds meaty flavour to the stock as it simmers.
Unclarified stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying all the flavour.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and colour, and its cut pea shapes add visual texture.

The step that matters

Whisk until it boils, then simmer. Whisking the egg white into the cold stock while heating helps it bind impurities into a raft that clears the broth. If the stock is stirred hard once the raft forms, or boils vigorously, the raft breaks up and the soup turns cloudy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, beans, asparagus, lettuce, carrot, beef, egg):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, beans, asparagus, lettuce, carrot, beef, 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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