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Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup with julienned onions, turnip, carrot, celery, and peas simmered in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Julienne Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Fry the shredded onions in butter until brown.

  2. Add mace, salt, and pepper, then stir in a spoonful of stock.

  3. Rub flour smooth with a little butter and fry with the onions.

  4. Strain the mixture through a colander and add more stock if desired.

Cook the vegetables and serve

  1. Boil the turnip, carrot, and celery fillets with a few green peas in water until tender.

  2. Add both the water and vegetables to the soup.

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. Turnip + carrottop 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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Onions
Frying them until brown builds a deep, sweet, savoury flavour base for the soup.
Flour
Frying it with butter and onions thickens the soup and gives it body.
Butter
Fat for frying the onions and flour, carrying flavour and helping browning.
Turnip, carrot, and celery
Tender fillets add body, mild sweetness and texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Rub flour smooth with butter before frying. Flour added to hot fat clumps unless it is first worked smooth with butter. Lumps stay raw-tasting and cloud the soup, so the flour must be fully dispersed before it meets the onions.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, pepper, flour, turnip, carrot, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, pepper, flour, turnip, carrot, 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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