Skip to main content
Main

A Good Vegetable Soup Maigre

A light vegetable soup made with butter, onions, turnips, carrots, celery, spinach, parsley, and boiled turnips and carrots, finished with wine or ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

A Good Vegetable Soup Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan over low heat.

  2. Slice the onion, turnip, carrot, and celery.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables to the pan with the shredded spinach and parsley.

  4. Toss the vegetables for 10 minutes.

Make the soup

  1. Add boiling water and the toasted bread.

  2. Simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Rub the mixture through a tamis.

Finish and serve

  1. Dice the boiled turnips and carrots.

  2. Add the diced turnips and carrots to the soup.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, Cayenne, and pounded mace.

  4. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  5. Before serving, add white wine or mushroom ketchup.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together320 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

Butter
Melts to coat the vegetables and carry their flavour into the soup.
Onion
Softens as it cooks, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the base.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavour and body as it softens in the butter.
Toasted bread
Thickens the soup slightly as it breaks down with the simmering liquid.
Spinach
Adds green colour and a mild, earthy flavour along with some body.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a tamis. Pressing the cooked soup through a fine sieve breaks down fibres and removes solids, giving a smooth texture. Pressing too hard or skipping it leaves the soup grainy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, turnip, carrot, celery, spinach, parsley, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, turnip, carrot, celery, spinach, parsley, bread. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes