Skip to main content
Main

Spanish Soup

A hearty soup of chestnuts, onions, potatoes, turnips, thyme, vinegar, butter, and cheese simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chestnut and turnip share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 46 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spanish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the chestnuts and vegetables in 2 quarts of water for 1.5 hours until tender.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve and return the soup to the saucepan.

  3. Add the butter, vinegar, and season with pepper and salt to taste. Let it boil for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Sift in the cheese 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. Chestnut + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  4. Potato + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Chestnuts
Break down into a thick, starchy base that gives the soup its body and sweet, nutty flavour.
Potatoes
Their starch thickens the soup and helps it turn smooth when sieved.
Spanish onions
Build savoury depth as they soften into the soup.
Turnips
Add earthy flavour and extra body to the vegetable base.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Grated cheese
Melts into the hot soup, adding salty, savoury richness at the end.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a sieve. Cooked chestnuts and potatoes are starchy, so pushing them through a sieve breaks them into fine particles that thicken the soup evenly. Skipping or rushing this leaves the soup grainy and thin.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, potato, turnip, thyme, vinegar, cheese, butter):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits about as well
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Chestnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, potato, turnip, thyme, vinegar, cheese, 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

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes