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Vegetable Marrow Soup

A soup made from vegetable marrow, stock, milk, and butter, served with fried croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Vegetable Marrow Soup

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the marrow

  1. Peel the vegetable marrow and remove the seeds.

  2. Cook the marrow in 1 ounce of butter until absorbed.

Make the soup

  1. Pour the stock over the marrow and cook until tender.

  2. Pass the stock and vegetable through a fine sieve.

  3. Blend ½ ounce of butter with the flour.

  4. Add the puree and stir until boiling.

  5. Add the milk. Reheat.

  6. Season with pepper and salt.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried croutons.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable marrow
Forms the bulk of the soup and, once cooked and sieved, gives it body and mild sweetness.
Flour
Blended with butter to form a roux that thickens the puree into a smooth soup.
Butter
Carries the marrow's flavour in the first cooking and enriches the soup with fat.
Milk
Softens the soup's flavour and adds creaminess to the finished texture.

The step that matters

Blending the flour and butter before adding the puree. Flour mixed with fat and then stirred into hot liquid thickens smoothly; if the puree is added without stirring, lumps form and the soup stays thin or grainy.

“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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