Name: Potato-and-Chervil Soup
Ingredients: 1 lb potatoes; 1 small lump of butter; salt to taste; pepper to taste; milk to achieve desired consistency; handful of chopped chervil; fried bread for serving

Why it works: Potato and chervil work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 96 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potato-and-Chervil Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Peel and wash the potatoes.
Boil the potatoes until tender.

Make the soup

Pass the boiled potatoes through a sieve into a saucepan.
Add butter, salt, pepper, and enough milk to reach the desired consistency.
Heat the mixture on the stove and bring to a boil.
Stir in the chopped chervil.

Serve

Serve the soup over pieces of fried bread.

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.

Potato + cherviltop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together96 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,305 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + cherviltop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together867 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes: Provide the starch and body that thicken the soup into a smooth purée.
Butter: Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Milk: Adds moisture and loosens the purée to the desired consistency.

Swap the chervil

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, butter, pepper, milk, bread):

Parsleyfits better
Thymefits better
Nutmegfits better
Chervilthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, butter, pepper, milk, bread. 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.