Why it works: Sorrel and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 247 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
The recipe
Ingredients
Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)
Directions
Cut the lettuce, sorrel, celery, and carrot into small squares and place them in a bowl of water.
Finely pick the chervil, wash all the vegetables well, and blanch them in a large pot of boiling water.
Drain the vegetables in a sieve.
Cut the turnips into small squares and fry them in clarified butter with chopped onions until golden.
Drain the turnips and onions in a sieve with the other vegetables.
Combine all the vegetables in a pot and add water to cover.
Simmer until the vegetables are tender, omitting any heavy sauces for a lighter soup.
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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.
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Sorrel + cherviltop 1% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together247 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together10,172 recipes
Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
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Lettuce + sorreltop 1% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together317 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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Lettuce + cherviltop 1% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together396 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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Sorrel + turniptop 2% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together179 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
Flavor stand-ins for the onion
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, sorrel, celery, carrot, chervil, turnip, butter):
- Leekbetter flavor fit
- Beetrootbetter flavor fit
- Parsnipbetter flavor fit
- Onionthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, sorrel, celery, carrot, chervil, turnip, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).
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