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Cressy Soup

A carrot soup thickened with flour, served over toasted bread and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Cressy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Clean and cut the carrots into small pieces.

  2. Boil the carrots with the water, salt, and pepper until they become a pulp.

  3. Rinse the mixture through a sieve.

Make the soup

  1. Heat the white stock in a pot.

  2. Add the carrot puree and the water they were boiled in to the stock.

  3. Mix in the flour and bring to a boil.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper if desired.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup into a tureen over small pieces of toasted bread and garnish with chopped parsley.

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 + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Break down into a pulp that thickens the soup and gives it body and sweet flavour.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries its savoury flavour.
Flour
Thickens the stock so the soup has a smoother, heavier body.

The step that matters

Mix in the flour and bring to a boil. Flour added to hot liquid can clump if not stirred in well. Bringing it to a boil activates its starch so the soup thickens evenly.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Carrotthe original
  3. Parsnipfits about as well
  4. Eggplantfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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