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Potage K I’Eau. — Water Soup.

A vegetable soup made with cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips, onion, celery, parsley, sorrel, chervil, peas, and water, seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potage K I’Eau. — Water Soup.

Ingredients

Directions

Simmer

  1. In a stewpot, combine the cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips, onion, celery, parsley, sorrel, and chervil tied together.

  2. Add 3 pints of water and ½ pint of peas tied in a cloth.

  3. Boil for 3 hours over low heat, adding more water as needed.

Finish and serve

  1. Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

  2. Strain out the vegetables you prefer to serve in the soup.

  3. Optionally, puree the peas before adding them to the soup.

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. Turnip + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Peas
Add body and a sweet, earthy flavour, and thicken the soup when pureed.
Parsnips
Contribute natural sweetness and a rich, starchy body to the broth.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and colour to the broth during the long simmer.
Onion
Builds savoury depth and aroma as it softens and releases its flavour into the water.
Turnips
Add a mild, slightly peppery flavour and some body to the broth.
Cabbage
Adds vegetable flavour and body to the broth during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Keep the simmer low and top up the water. A gentle, long simmer slowly extracts flavour from the vegetables and keeps the broth clear. A hard boil evaporates liquid quickly and can cloud the soup, so the water level must be watched over three hours.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, carrot, parsnip, turnip, celery, parsley, sorrel):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, carrot, parsnip, turnip, celery, parsley, sorrel. 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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