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Gravy Soup

A soup made with strong stock, sweet herbs, carrot, turnip, celery, vermicelli or macaroni, served with carrot slices and fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Prepare 3 quarts of strong stock and season it with a bunch of sweet herbs, a carrot, a turnip, and a head of celery.

  2. Do not serve the herbs and vegetables in the soup.

  3. Add vermicelli or macaroni to the soup.

Serve

  1. Serve with thin slices of carrot and small pieces of fried bread cut into fancy shapes.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Celery + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Strong stock
Forms the liquid base that carries all the flavour of the soup.
Vermicelli or macaroni
Adds body and a soft, starchy bite to the broth.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, bread):

  1. Parsnipfits about as well
  2. Turnipthe original
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Tomatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, bread. 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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