Skip to main content
Dessert

Potage a LA Flamande, or Flemish Soup

A vegetable soup with lettuce, sorrel, mint, carrots, celery, chervil, onion, cucumber, consommé, sugar, salt, sauce tournee, asparagus, egg yolks, and cream.

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

Why it works: Sorrel and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 247 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potage a LA Flamande, or Flemish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Combine the chopped lettuce, sorrel, mint, carrots, celery, and chervil in a large basin.

  2. Fry the chopped onion in clarified butter in a soup pot until it begins to brown.

  3. Add the washed and drained vegetables to the onions.

  4. Stew gently, turning occasionally.

  5. When the butter begins to foam, remove from heat and cover tightly.

  6. Fry the chopped cucumber in clarified butter.

  7. Drain the cucumber and add it to the other vegetables.

Simmer the soup

  1. Pour in the consommé, add sugar and salt, and let it boil gently, skimming as needed.

  2. Add more consommé to maintain the original quantity while boiling.

  3. Once well boiled, stir in the sauce tournee and continue boiling gently.

  4. Before serving, taste and add veal glaze if needed, then mix in the boiled asparagus.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and mix the egg yolks with the cream.

  2. Stir the egg yolk-cream mixture into the soup.

  3. Serve immediately in a warm tureen to prevent thickening.

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. Sorrel + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together247 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and add richness when stirred in off the heat.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness, softening the flavour and texture of the soup.
Sauce tournee
Thickens the consommé base so the soup has body.
Clarified butter
Fat for frying the onion and cucumber, adding savoury browned flavour.
Consommé
Clear meat stock that forms the liquid base of the soup.
Lettuce
Provides the main vegetable body and mild, sweet flavour when stewed.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk and cream mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated, so the soup must be off the heat and not boiling when they are stirred in. Boiling can curdle the yolks, and the soup should be served promptly because it thickens as it stands.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, sorrel, carrot, celery, chervil, onion, butter):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, sorrel, carrot, celery, chervil, onion, butter. 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

Mint JellyMint Jelly22 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes