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Crecy Soup No. I. Potage a LA Crecy.

A vegetable soup made with carrots, onions, turnip, celery, butter, milk, thyme, parsley, garlic, corn starch, and boiled water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Crecy Soup No. I. Potage a LA Crecy.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Clean and chop the vegetables.

  2. In a frying pan, melt the butter and add the vegetables and sugar.

  3. Fry until they begin to brown slightly, then add a few tablespoons of boiling water.

  4. Simmer for 10 minutes, then transfer to a soup kettle.

Simmer the soup

  1. Add the remaining ingredients except for the corn‑starch and milk, along with 1 quart of boiling water.

  2. Cover and simmer gently for about 2 hours until the vegetables are perfectly soft.

Finish and serve

  1. Mash everything through a sieve and return to the fire with the milk.

  2. When boiling, stir in the corn‑starch blended with a little cold water or milk.

  3. Boil for 2 to 3 minutes and serve immediately with croutons.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 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

Carrots
Add sweetness and body, and their colour gives the soup its orange tone.
Onions
Add savoury depth and flavour as they soften and brown in the butter.
Butter
Carries the vegetables' flavour and adds richness when the vegetables are fried.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the soup's flavour when stirred in at the end.
Corn-starch
Thickens the soup as it boils, giving it body.

The step that matters

Stirring in the corn-starch. Corn-starch must be blended with cold liquid first and added while the soup is boiling. Starch added dry or to a cool soup clumps and does not thicken evenly, and it needs a brief boil to reach full thickness.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, butter, milk, thyme, parsley):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, butter, milk, thyme, parsley. 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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