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Thick Spring Soup

A thick soup made with spring onions, carrots, lettuce, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel, mint, asparagus, and French rolls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and sorrel 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 ↓

Thick Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a stewpan, combine the spring onions, carrots, lettuce, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel, mint, and asparagus with the butter.

  2. Cook on medium heat for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

Make the soup

  1. Add the soaked French rolls to thicken the soup and a few mushroom trimmings.

  2. Pour in the broth and bring to a boil.

  3. Skim off any foam and strain the soup through a fine sieve.

  4. Season with salt and sugar to taste.

Serve

  1. Garnish with asparagus points or croutons 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. Chervil + sorreltop 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. Spinach + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

French rolls
Soaked and squeezed, they thicken the soup body.
Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables gently in the pan before the liquid goes in.
Spring onions
Provide mild onion flavour that builds the base of the soup.
Broth
Liquid base that carries the vegetable flavour through the soup.
Spinach
Adds soft body and a green, earthy flavour to the puree-like soup.
Asparagus
Contributes grassy flavour and colour to the vegetable mixture.

The step that matters

Straining through a fine sieve. Pressing the cooked vegetables and bread through a fine sieve removes fibres and skins, giving the smooth, thick texture the soup relies on. Skimming foam first keeps the final broth clear and free of bitter, scummy flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, lettuce, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, lettuce, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel. 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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