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Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup made with onions, turnip, carrot, celery, peas, stock, and butter, finished with a smooth flour roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 onion base

  1. Fry the shredded onions in butter until brown.

  2. Add mace, salt, pepper, and stock to the onions.

  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 green 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
Browned in butter, they build the deep, sweet flavour base of the soup.
Flour
Cooked with butter, it thickens the soup and gives it body.
Butter
Fat that browns the onions and carries flavour through the soup.
Turnip
Cut into fillets and cooked until tender, adding mild body and vegetable flavour.
Carrot
Cooked until tender, adding sweetness and colour to the soup.

The step that matters

Frying the flour into the onions. Flour must be mixed smooth with butter before it goes in, and it needs time to cook; otherwise it stays lumpy and tastes raw. Cooking it briefly in fat develops flavour and lets it thicken the liquid evenly.

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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