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Celery Soup

A creamy soup made with celery, onion, stock, butter, flour, milk, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine celery, onion, peppercorns with stock in a saucepan, boil until tender, then strain through a fine sieve.

Make the soup

  1. In a separate saucepan, melt butter.

  2. Add flour to the melted butter and mix well.

  3. Gradually add the strained stock to the flour mixture.

  4. Stir until the mixture boils, then boil for five minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add milk, cream (if using), and salt.

  2. If the soup is too thick, add more milk.

  3. Reheat 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Celery
Provides the main vegetable flavour and body once simmered and strained.
Flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when cooked in the hot stock.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds a rich, savoury fat to the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the soup's texture, and can thin it if too thick.
Onion
Adds a mellow aromatic sweetness as it simmers in the stock.

The step that matters

Adding the stock to the flour and butter. Flour clumps if liquid goes in too fast. Adding the stock gradually while stirring disperses the starch evenly, and stirring until it boils lets the starch swell into a smooth, thickened base.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, flour, milk, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, flour, milk, cream. 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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