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Scotch-leek Soup

A soup made with mutton stock, leeks, pepper, salt, and oatmeal thickened with cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and pepper work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 965 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Scotch-leek Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a stew pot, combine the water from boiling the mutton with chopped leeks, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Simmer for one hour.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix oatmeal with a little cold water until smooth.

  2. Pour the oatmeal mixture into the soup.

  3. Set the pot on a low heat and let it simmer gently, ensuring it does not burn to the bottom.

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. Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Mutton + leektop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Oatmeal
Thickens the broth as its starch swells and gelatinizes during gentle simmering.
Leeks
Add mild onion-like flavour and body to the broth as they soften.
Water from boiling a leg of mutton
Serves as the flavourful meat-based broth that forms the soup's base.

The step that matters

Pouring in the oatmeal mixture. Oatmeal stirred in as a smooth slurry disperses evenly; added as dry lumps or to a boiling pot it clumps and can scorch. Keeping the heat low and stirring prevents sticking at the bottom, where starch burns easily.

Swap the leek

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Leekthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper. 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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