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Leek Soup, Commonly Called Cock-a-Leeky

A soup made with fowl, leeks, spinach, parsley, pepper, salt, and optional beef or prunes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and spinach share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Leek Soup, Commonly Called Cock-a-Leeky

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Prepare the fowl as for boiling and place it in a pot with the beef, if using.

  2. Stew until the fowl is nearly tender.

  3. Cut the white part of the leeks, including a little green, into 1-inch pieces.

  4. Add the leeks, spinach, and parsley to the pot.

  5. Stew until the soup is rich and flavorful.

Season and serve

  1. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. If desired, add the French prunes.

  3. Serve the soup with the fowl in a tureen.

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. Leek + spinachtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Leek + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together759 recipes

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

  4. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  5. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Old fowl
Releases flavor and gelatin into the broth during long, slow stewing.
Leeks
Add a mild onion-like sweetness and body to the soup as they soften.
Lean beef
Adds meaty depth to the broth during stewing.
French prunes
Add sweetness and a rich, fruity note to the soup.

The step that matters

Stew until the fowl is nearly tender. Old fowl is tough and needs long, gentle simmering so collagen breaks down into gelatin, enriching the broth and softening the meat. Boiling hard can toughen the proteins and make the meat stringy.

Swap the leek

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, spinach, parsley, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Leekthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, spinach, parsley, pepper. 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.

More leek soup recipes

Scotch 9Chicken 4Potato 4Welsh 3 See all 47 →

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