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Soups and Broths

A simple onion soup with celery and fried bread, simmered in butter and water with peppercorns and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Soups and Broths

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Fry the onions in butter until brown, being careful not to burn them.

  2. Put the fried onions into a stewpan with boiling water, peppercorns, and salt.

  3. Stew gently for 2 hours, then strain the soup through a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the soup to the stewpan and add stewed celery and fried bread.

  2. Heat until near boiling, then pour into a tureen and serve hot.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Celery + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Provide the main flavour base, sweetened and deepened by browning in butter.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the onions, helping them brown and carrying flavour.
Stewed celery
Adds vegetable body and a mild, savoury aroma to the finished soup.
Fried bread
Adds crisp, toasted texture that softens as it sits in the hot soup.

The step that matters

Fry the onions until brown without burning them. Browning builds deep, sweet flavour through caramelisation, but burnt onions turn bitter and taint the whole pot of soup.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, 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.

More onion soup recipes

French 31Brown 15with Milk 7White 5Bavarian 4Bermuda 4 See all 236 →

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