Skip to main content
Main

Onion Soup Maigre

A lean onion soup flavored with herring or anchovies, mace, allspice, and a milk‑rolled roll crumb.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Onion Soup Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the onions, turnips, and celery.

  2. In a pot, fry the vegetables in butter until browned but not burnt.

Make the soup

  1. Add the vegetables to boiling water along with the herring or anchovies, anchovy sauce, mace, allspice, pepper, and salt.

  2. Let the mixture stew until tender enough to pulp.

  3. Boil the crumb of the French rolls in milk.

  4. Pass the mixture through a colander with the boiled roll crumbs.

  5. Return the soup to the heat and simmer until hot.

  6. If the soup is not thick enough, beat in the raw egg yolks 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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together445 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

Onions
Provide the main sweet, savoury body of the soup as they cook down.
Butter
Browns the vegetables first, adding fat and roasted flavour.
French rolls
Their crumb, boiled in milk, thickens the pulped soup.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the soup when beaten in before serving.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables in butter. Vegetables should brown without burning. Scorched butter and sugars turn the soup bitter and dark, while gentle browning builds a deeper, sweeter flavour.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, turnip, celery, butter, anchovy, allspice, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, turnip, celery, butter, anchovy, allspice, 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.

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipes