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Onion Soup

A savory soup made with onions, turnips, celery, butter, water, herring or anchovies, mace, allspice, pepper, salt, French roll crumbs, milk, and optional egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,418 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Onion Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the onions, turnips, and celery.

  2. Fry them in butter until browned but not burnt.

Make the soup

  1. Add the vegetables to boiling water with the herring or anchovies, mace, allspice, pepper, and salt.

  2. Let the mixture stew until tender enough to pulp.

  3. Boil the roll crumbs in milk, then pass them through a colander with the vegetables.

  4. Return the mixture to the heat and stew until hot.

  5. If the soup is not thick enough, beat in the raw egg yolks just before serving.

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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  3. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together445 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
Form the bulk of the soup and build its sweet, savory flavor when browned.
Butter
Fries the vegetables, adding richness and helping them brown.
French roll crumbs
Soaked in milk and pulped in, they thicken the soup and give it body.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the soup when beaten in just before serving.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables in butter. Browning caramelizes the sugars in the onions and turnips, building color and depth; if they burn, the soup turns bitter.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, turnip, celery, butter, anchovy, allspice, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, turnip, celery, butter, anchovy, allspice, pepper. 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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