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Celery Cream Soup

A creamy soup made with celery, leeks, ham, butter, milk, cream, and potato flour.

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

Why it works: Celery and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,093 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Celery Cream Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the root end from the leeks and slice the white part, placing it in a clean saucepan.

  2. Remove the root from the celery and cut the inner stalks into shreds.

Make the soup

  1. Add the celery, leeks, ham, butter, a pinch of salt, a few white peppercorns, and a bit of mace to the pan.

  2. Cook without browning for 15 minutes, then add the stock and skim the surface.

  3. Simmer for about 1.5 hours, then pass through a fine sieve back into the pan.

Finish and serve

  1. Blend the potato flour with a little cold milk and add it 10 minutes before serving.

  2. Heat the milk and cream separately, mix with the puree, and serve with diced croutons.

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. Celery + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Leek + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Celery + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Forms the main body of the soup and gives it its characteristic flavour.
Leeks
Add a mild onion-like sweetness and savoury depth to the base.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour during the initial gentle cooking.
Potato flour
Thickens the soup to a smooth, velvety body.
Cream
Adds fat and a silky, rounded texture to the finished soup.
Stock
Provides the liquid base and savoury backbone of the soup.

The step that matters

Cook without browning. Gentle cooking without browning keeps the celery and leeks sweet and pale, so the soup stays delicate in flavour and colour. Browning would add bitter, roasted notes that dominate the cream soup.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (leek, potato, flour, butter, ham, milk, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against leek, potato, flour, butter, ham, milk, cream. 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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