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Spring Vegetable Soup

A veal soup with carrots, turnips, onions, lettuce, celery, endive, cucumber, asparagus, served with butter, parsley, bacon or pickled pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Spring Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, stew the knuckle of veal in cold water with salt, carrot, turnips, and onion for three hours over low heat.

  2. Skim off the scum at the beginning and fat at the end.

  3. After one hour, add the chopped lettuce hearts, celery, endive, white onion, cucumber, and asparagus.

  4. Season with white pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat with some of the vegetables, melted butter, chopped parsley, and optional bacon or pickled pork.

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. Lettuce + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  3. Turnip + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 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

Knuckle of veal
Gives the broth its body and rich meaty flavor as it simmers slowly.
Lettuce hearts
Add tender vegetable texture and a mild, fresh flavor to the soup.
Celery
Contributes aromatic savory flavor and some crisp texture to the broth.
Asparagus
Adds fresh, slightly grassy flavor and tender-crisp texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Skim off the scum at the beginning and fat at the end. Scum rising early can cloud the broth and taste impure, while leftover fat makes the soup greasy. Removing both keeps the broth clear and clean-tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, carrot, turnip, lettuce, celery, endive, cucumber):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, carrot, turnip, lettuce, celery, endive, cucumber. 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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