Skip to main content
Main

Celery Soup

A soup made from stewed celery and onion, blended with stock and milk, thickened with cornflour, and served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash the celery thoroughly and cut it into 1-inch lengths.

  2. Put the celery and onion into a pan with just enough water to cover them and stew gently for 2 hours, or until very tender.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve to remove any solids.

Make the soup

  1. Put the puree into a pan with the stock, milk, bay leaf, mace, and salt and pepper to taste.

  2. Mix the cornflour with a little cold water.

  3. Just before the soup boils, add the mixture to the pan.

  4. Stir continuously until the soup thickens, then simmer for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of fried bread.

  2. For a richer soup, stir in ½ pint of whipped cream 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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main flavour and, once stewed and sieved, the body of the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the flavour of the stock.
Cornflour
Thickens the soup when stirred into liquid and heated until it sets.
Spanish onion
Adds savoury sweetness as it softens during the long stew.

The step that matters

Adding the cornflour mixture. Cornflour must be dispersed in cold water first and added near boiling, then stirred constantly. Added to hot liquid without this, it clumps, and the soup thickens unevenly.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, milk, onion, 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.

More celery soup recipes

Cream 7Creamy 3Spanish 3 See all 210 →

You might also like

Celery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipesCelery Cream SoupCelery Cream Soup15 recipesCelery Seed InfusionCelery Seed Infusion10 recipes