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Soup

Scotch Leek Soup

A leek soup made with mutton broth, oatmeal, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and pepper work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 965 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Scotch Leek Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour the water from boiling the mutton into a stew pot.

  2. Add chopped leeks, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Simmer for 1 hour.

  4. Mix oatmeal with a little cold water until smooth, then pour the oatmeal mixture into the broth.

  5. Set on low heat and simmer gently until the leeks are tender. Avoid letting it burn.

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. Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Mutton + leektop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Leeks
Soften during simmering and give the soup its main flavour and body.
Oatmeal
Thickens the broth as its starches swell and gelatinize during simmering.

The step that matters

Adding the oatmeal mixture. Oatmeal mixed with cold water must be smooth before it goes into the hot broth. Lumps form if it is added dry or unmixed, and they are hard to remove once the starch sets.

Swap the leek

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Leekthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, 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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