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Onion Soup Mai G Re

A savory soup made with onions, turnips, celery, butter, water, herring or anchovies, mace, allspice, pepper, salt, French roll crumbs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 4,418 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Onion Soup Mai G Re

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the onions, turnips, and celery.

  2. Fry them in butter until browned, but not burnt.

Make the soup

  1. Add the vegetables to boiling water with the herring or anchovies, anchovy sauce, mace, allspice, pepper, and salt.

  2. Let the mixture stew until tender enough to pulp.

  3. Boil the crumbs of French rolls in milk.

  4. Pass the vegetables through a colander.

  5. Return the mixture to the heat and stew until hot.

  6. If not thick enough, add beaten yolks of raw eggs just 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together16,012 recipes

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

  3. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together445 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Provide the main body and sweet, savoury flavour of the soup.
Butter
Browns the vegetables, building deeper roasted flavour before they are simmered.
French rolls
Their crumbs, boiled in milk, thicken the soup and add body.
Egg yolks (in the method)
Enrich and thicken the soup when stirred in near the end.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables in butter. Browning builds rich, roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction, but burnt butter and vegetables turn bitter, so heat must be moderate and watched closely.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, turnip, celery, butter, anchovy, allspice, pepper):

  1. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  2. Thymebetter flavor fit
  3. Capersbetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, turnip, celery, butter, anchovy, allspice, pepper. 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).

“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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