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Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup with onions, turnip, carrot, celery, peas, and a butter‑flour base.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

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 stock.

  3. Mix flour with a little butter until smooth, then add to the onions and let fry.

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

Add the vegetables

  1. Boil the turnip, carrot, celery, and peas in a little water until tender.

  2. Add the boiled vegetables and their water 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
Browning in butter builds the deep, sweet flavour of the soup base.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it fries with the butter and onions.
Turnip
Adds body and a mild, earthy sweetness as it becomes tender.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and soft texture once boiled until tender.
Celery
Adds savoury, aromatic flavour and soft texture once boiled.

The step that matters

Frying the flour with butter. Flour must be cooked in fat until smooth and fully mixed before it goes into the soup. Adding it lumpy or undercooked leaves a pasty taste and uneven thickness, because raw starch does not thicken well until it is hydrated and heated.

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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