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Cressy Soup

A vegetable soup with spinach, sorrel, onions, carrots, turnips, ham, celery, cucumber, peas, and herbs simmered in broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cressy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch spinach, sorrel, onions, carrots, and turnips in boiling water for a few minutes.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, melt the ham and butter with celery and cucumbers.

  2. Add the blanched vegetables and green peas to the stewpan.

  3. Stew everything together for two hours.

  4. Add a little broth and a faggot of herbs with cloves.

  5. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  6. Season with salt, pepper, and sugar to taste.

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. Sorrel + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Spinach + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Spinach + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together320 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts with the ham and vegetables to carry flavour and give the soup richness.
Spinach
Adds green colour and a soft, earthy body once blanched and stewed.
Sorrel
Contributes a sharp, lemony acidity that brightens the soup.
Green peas
Thicken the purée and add sweetness and body.
Onions
Build savoury depth and aroma as they soften during stewing.

The step that matters

Stewing for two hours. Long, gentle stewing softens the vegetables fully so the mixture can be rubbed smooth; cooking too hard or too briefly leaves a coarse, uneven purée and can scorch the butter and ham on the base of the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, sorrel, carrot, turnip, ham, butter, celery):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, sorrel, carrot, turnip, ham, butter, celery. 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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