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Milk Soup

A soup made with onions, turnip, celery, stock, milk, and thickened with flour, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Milk Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the minced onions, turnip, and celery in the stock or water until tender.

  2. Rub the cooked vegetables through a sieve.

  3. Add the sieved vegetables and cooking liquid to the milk and bring to a boil.

  4. Thicken the soup with the potato or rice flour mixed with a little milk or water.

  5. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried bread.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Give the soup its base flavour and sweetness as they soften.
Turnip
Adds body and a mild, earthy sweetness to the sieved vegetable base.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid that gives the soup its richness and smooth texture.
Potato flour
Starch that thickens the milk as it heats, giving the soup body.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with the flour mixture. Starch must be mixed smoothly with a little cold liquid first, then stirred into the hot soup, or it will clump. Starch thickens as it heats and swells, so the soup should be stirred while it cooks.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, milk, potato, pepper, bread):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, milk, potato, pepper, 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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