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Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with butter, onions, celery, spinach, cabbage, parsley, bread crusts, pepper, mace, beet leaves, egg yolks, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 427 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Melt butter in a stew pan.

  2. Add sliced onions and shake the pan for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Add celery, spinach, chopped lettuce, and parsley, then shake the pan well for 10 minutes.

  4. Pour in water.

  5. Add bread crusts, ground pepper, and mace.

  6. If using, add chopped beet leaves.

Simmer and finish

  1. Boil gently for 1 hour.

  2. Just before serving, beat in egg yolks and vinegar.

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. Spinach + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

  3. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  4. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour from the start of the soup.
Onions
Sweeten and build the savoury base as they soften in the fat.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and add richness when beaten in off the heat.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the flavour of the vegetables.
Bread crusts
Add body and help thicken the broth as they break down in simmering.

The step that matters

Beat in the egg yolks and vinegar just before serving. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can curdle or scramble if the soup is boiling. Adding them off the heat, just before serving, keeps the soup smooth and silky.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, celery, spinach, lettuce, 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.

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