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To Make Onion Soup

A soup made from boiled onions, fowl gravy, bread crumbs, cream, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,212 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Make Onion Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil the onions in equal parts milk and water, changing the liquid three times.

  2. Once the onions are soft, rub them through a fine sieve.

Make the gravy

  1. Cut the fowl into pieces.

  2. Boil the fowl pieces for gravy with mace.

  3. Strain the gravy.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine the onion pulp with the strained gravy and simmer gently.

  2. Add the grated bread and cream, then season with cayenne and salt.

  3. Garnish with asparagus 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. Onion + asparagustop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,212 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + asparagustop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,968 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Milk + asparagustop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together650 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Spanish onions
Form the main body of the soup, becoming sweet and smooth when boiled and sieved.
Old fowl
Provides rich meat flavour to the gravy that is combined with the onion pulp.
Crumb of penny loaf
Thickens the soup, giving it body as it simmers with the onion pulp.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Rub the onions through a fine sieve. Pressing the cooked onions fully into a smooth pulp gives the soup its texture. Any lumps left behind will stay in the finished soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, milk, cream, pepper, asparagus):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, milk, cream, pepper, asparagus. 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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