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Soup

Herb Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with lettuces, spinach, purslane, onions, parsley, cucumbers, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and purslane share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Herb Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and chop the lettuces, spinach, purslane, onions, and parsley.

  2. Remove seeds from the cucumbers and slice them.

Cook

  1. In a stewpan, combine all vegetables with the butter and stir until melted.

  2. Cover and cook over very low heat for 2 hours.

  3. Add water to achieve desired thickness, then season with pepper and salt.

  4. Let the soup simmer for 1 hour.

  5. If desired, add boiled and chopped asparagus tops before serving.

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. Spinach + purslanetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Purslane + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Purslane + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Spinach + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together355 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts with the vegetables to add richness and carry flavour through the soup.
Lettuces
Break down during slow cooking to give the soup its body and mild sweetness.
Spinach
Softens into the soup, adding green colour and a deeper vegetal flavour.
Cucumbers
Release their water during slow cooking, adding moisture and a light fresh taste.

The step that matters

Cover and cook over very low heat. Vegetables cooked gently in their own juices with butter keep their flavour and colour. Higher heat can scorch the butter and turn the greens dull and bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, spinach, purslane, parsley, cucumber, butter, pepper):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, spinach, purslane, parsley, cucumber, butter, pepper. 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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