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Crecy Soup

A carrot soup made with onions, leeks, bacon rinds, and butter, served with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Crecy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash, prepare, and cut the carrots, onion, and leek into pieces.

  2. In a pan, combine the vegetables with the dripping and sugar, cover, and simmer on low heat until soft.

Make the soup

  1. Gradually add the boiling water or stock, along with salt, pepper, and bacon rinds.

  2. Boil until the mixture becomes a thick puree, then strain through a sieve.

  3. Return the soup to the pot, add a small piece of butter, and cook gently to thicken if necessary.

  4. Add parsley, salt, and pepper 10 to 15 minutes before serving.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup into a tureen and serve with croutons on a separate dish.

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

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  5. Leek + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together759 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Form the bulk of the soup and give it its body, colour, and sweetness.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and aroma as it softens in the fat.
Leek
Contributes a mild onion-like flavour and soft body to the puree.
Dripping or butter
Carries flavour from the vegetables and adds richness to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Boiling until a thick puree forms. Cooking long enough lets the vegetables break down fully so the puree becomes smooth and thick. Straining afterward removes fibres that remain, so the texture is silky rather than grainy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, sugar, leek, butter, pepper, bread, parsley):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, sugar, leek, butter, pepper, bread, parsley. 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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