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Herb Soup

A soup made from various greens, cucumbers, butter, and spinach juice, simmered with water, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and purslane share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Herb Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and chop the lettuces, spinach, purslane, beet leaves, young onions, and parsley.

  2. Remove seeds from the cucumbers and slice them.

Cook the soup

  1. In a stew pan, combine all vegetables with the spinach juice and butter. Stir until the butter melts.

  2. Cover the pan and cook over low heat for 2 hours.

  3. Add boiling water to achieve desired thickness.

  4. Season the soup with pepper and salt.

  5. Let the soup simmer for 1 hour.

  6. Add boiled asparagus tops cut into bits 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. Spinach + purslanetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Purslane + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Purslane + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Spinach + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together355 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to coat the vegetables and add richness and a silky body to the soup.
Cucumbers
Add moisture and a fresh, mild flavor as they soften during cooking.
Spinach
Adds deep green color and a earthy flavor to the soup.
Lettuces
Soften during long cooking, adding body and a mild, sweet vegetable flavor.

The step that matters

Covered low-heat cooking of the vegetables. Cooking covered on low heat lets the vegetables release their water and soften gently in the butter, so the soup becomes tender and flavorful without scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, spinach, purslane, parsley, cucumber, butter, pepper):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, spinach, purslane, parsley, cucumber, butter, 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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