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Potage Aux Laitues, or Lettuce Soup

A light soup made from cabbage lettuces, salt, sugar, and good consommé.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 622 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Potage Aux Laitues, or Lettuce Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuces

  1. Wash and blanch the lettuces in salt water.

  2. Drain the lettuces in a colander and then place them in a stewpan of clear water for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the lettuces and cut them into three pieces.

Make the soup

  1. Put the cut lettuces in a soup pot with a little sugar and salt.

  2. Fill the pot with good consommé and heat until ready to serve.

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. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Lettuce + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,486 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Cabbage + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,037 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

Cabbage lettuces
Form the soup's body and give it a tender, leafy texture.
Good consommé
Supplies the liquid and the main savory flavour of the soup.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the salt and the lettuce's mild bitterness.

The step that matters

Blanching the lettuces. Blanching briefly in salted water softens the leaves and helps keep them bright green. Leaving them too long turns them dull and mushy, so watch them closely and move on quickly.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, sugar):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, sugar. 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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