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Garbure Fanchonette

A hearty French bean soup with bacon, ham, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 317 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Garbure Fanchonette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Shell the beans and boil them in salted water, then drain.

  2. Trim and wash the lettuces, leek, and sorrel; shred the lettuces.

Make the soup

  1. Mince the bacon and heat it with the butter; add the lettuce, leek, and sorrel, and cook briefly.

  2. Add the broad beans, mix well, and stir in the ground rice.

  3. Moisten with the stock and a pint of water; stir until it boils, then cook gently for 30 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Skin and rub everything through a fine sieve.

  5. Return to the pot, reheat, and season to taste with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg yolks with the cream and stir into the hot soup.

  2. Stir for a few minutes over low heat without boiling, then add the chopped herbs and the ham cut into small pieces, and serve.

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 + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together217 recipes

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

  4. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

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

  5. Beans + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 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

Broad beans
Provide the main body and starchy substance of the soup once puréed.
Cabbage lettuces
Add leafy bulk and a soft, mellow vegetable flavour to the purée.
Ground rice
Thickens the soup so it has a smooth, body-rich texture.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the soup when stirred in off the heat, giving a silky finish.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the flavour and smoothing the texture.
Bacon
Contributes fat and savoury, smoky flavour to the base.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk and cream. Once the yolks are in, the soup must not boil, or the egg proteins will scramble and curdle, leaving the soup grainy instead of smooth and creamy. Keep it over low heat and stir gently.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, lettuce, sorrel, leek, butter, rice, chicken):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, lettuce, sorrel, leek, butter, rice, chicken. 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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