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Butter Soup

A creamy vegetable soup made with carrots, turnips, onions, celery, sweet herbs, butter, flour, eggs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Butter Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Peel and quarter the carrots, turnips, and onions.

  2. Chop the celery and add it along with the sweet herbs to a saucepan.

  3. Pour 2 quarts of water over the vegetables and boil until soft.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve and return the liquid to the saucepan.

  5. Bring the liquid to a boil again.

Finish and serve

  1. Warm the butter and beat it until creamy.

  2. Mix in the flour and eggs until smooth.

  3. Slowly pour the butter mixture into the boiling vegetable water.

  4. Boil the soup for 5 minutes, then serve in a tureen with croutons or toast.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the soup and enrich it as they set in the hot liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy mouthfeel to the broth.
Flour
Helps bind the butter and egg mixture so it blends smoothly into the soup.
Carrots
Provide sweetness and body to the broth as they cook soft.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma to the vegetable water.

The step that matters

Pouring the butter mixture into the boiling water. Eggs can curdle if the mixture meets very hot liquid too quickly. Adding it slowly while stirring, and keeping the soup at a gentle boil rather than a hard one, helps it stay smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, butter, flour, egg, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, butter, flour, egg, 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.

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