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Turkish Soup

A tomato and rice soup seasoned with peppercorns, celery salt, bay leaf, and finished with a butter-flour roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Turkish Soup

Why it works: Tomato and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,377 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Turkish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Cook the rice in the stock until soft.

Make the tomato base

  1. Cook the bay leaf, onion, peppercorns, and celery salt with the stewed tomatoes for 30 minutes.

Combine and bind

  1. Combine the tomato mixture with the cooked rice.

  2. Melt the butter in a small pan and mix in the flour to create a roux.

  3. Add the roux to the soup to bind it.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Rice + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,169 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens in the stock and thickens the soup body as it cooks.
Stewed tomatoes
Provide the main tomato flavour, acidity and liquid for the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flour when making the roux.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked in butter to form a roux.
Stock
Forms the savoury liquid base in which the rice cooks.

The step that matters

Adding the roux to the soup. Flour clumps if dropped in raw or added too quickly. Cooking it briefly in butter first and stirring it into the hot soup gradually helps it disperse evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, rice, 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.

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