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Potage a LA “bonne Femme,” or Soupe a L’oseille

A French soup made with sorrel, lettuce, onion, parsley, eggs, cream, mashed potato, and toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 317 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potage a LA “bonne Femme,” or Soupe a L’oseille

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the greens

  1. In a saucepan, combine the butter, lettuce, sorrel, onion, and parsley. Cover and stew gently for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

Make the soup

  1. Gradually pour in the boiling water while stirring continuously.

  2. Stir the remaining cream, rubbed smooth with the mashed potato, into the soup along with the seasonings.

Finish and serve

  1. In a tureen, mix the egg yolks with a little of the cream or milk.

  2. Pour some boiling soup over the eggs in the tureen and mix well.

  3. Add the pieces of stale bread, then pour in the rest of the soup.

  4. Cover and let it stand in a warm place for 5 minutes before serving.

  5. Optionally, press the soup through a sieve 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lettuce + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel
Provides the sharp, lemony acidity that defines the soup's flavour.
Eggs
Egg yolks enrich and thicken the soup, giving it body and a smooth texture.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour and softens the greens during the initial gentle stew.
Flour
Starch that thickens the soup as it is combined with the cooking liquid.
Mashed potato
Adds body and creaminess to the soup as it is rubbed smooth into the liquid.
Cream or rich milk
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks to the soup. Egg yolks scramble if they meet very hot liquid directly. Mixing them with a little cream first and then slowly adding hot soup gently warms them, giving a smooth, thickened result.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, lettuce, sorrel, pepper, egg, parsley, nutmeg):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Spinachbetter flavor fit
  3. Leekbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lettuce, sorrel, pepper, egg, parsley, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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