Skip to main content
Main

Cream of Vegetable Soup

A soup made from boiled vegetables, milk, and butter, thickened with flour and seasoned with salt, pepper, celery, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cream of Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Boil the vegetables in salted water until tender.

  2. Mash the vegetables through a colander.

Make the soup

  1. Add enough milk to achieve desired consistency.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt, pepper, celery, and onion.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Cream together the butter and flour, then add to the soup.

  5. Cook thoroughly and serve immediately.

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

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Provides liquid and creaminess, setting the soup's body and consistency.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and smoothing the texture.
Flour
Thickens the soup when creamed with butter and stirred in, giving body.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour mixed with butter thickens the soup only when it is fully blended in and heated. Adding it in lumps or without cooking it through can leave a raw floury taste and uneven, grainy thickness.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, pepper, celery, butter, flour. 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.

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipesCelery Cream SoupCelery Cream Soup15 recipes