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Chestnut Soup

A soup made from Spanish chestnuts, gravy stock, spices, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Chestnut Soup

Why it works: Mace and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,009 recipes. The science ↓

Chestnut Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Remove the outer rind from the chestnuts and place them in warm water.

  2. When the water is too hot to touch, remove the chestnuts, peel them quickly, and place them in cold water.

  3. Weigh the chestnuts and use ¾ pound for each quart of soup.

Make the soup

  1. Cover the chestnuts with gravy stock and simmer for about 45 minutes until tender.

  2. Drain the chestnuts and mash them smoothly or press through a fine sieve.

  3. Gradually mix in the appropriate amount of stock, adding mace, cayenne, and salt to taste.

  4. Stir often until the soup boils, then add the cream for improved flavor.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes
  2. Chestnut + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together643 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Chestnut + macetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Spanish chestnuts
Provide the starchy body that thickens the soup when mashed or sieved.
Rich cream
Adds fat and a smooth, silky texture to the finished soup.
Gravy stock
Supplies the liquid and savoury base in which the chestnuts cook and are thinned.

The step that matters

Adding the cream after the soup boils. Cream can curdle or separate if it is boiled hard for long, so it is best added once the soup is hot and stirred gently.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mace, cream):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Walnutfits about as well
  4. Chestnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mace, cream. 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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