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Soup

Another Vegetable Soup

A vegetable soup made with peas, onions, cucumbers, lettuce, butter, and optional spinach juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Another Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pea base

  1. Boil 2 quarts of water with 1 quart of old green peas, pea shells, mint, and 2-3 onions until reduced to 1 quart.

  2. Strain and pulp the mixture through a sieve.

Stew the vegetables

  1. In a pot, stew 1 pint of young peas, 2-3 sliced onions, 2-3 cucumbers, and lettuce stalks in enough water to cover them.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, and add 2 ounces of butter.

Combine and finish

  1. Combine this mixture with the pulped liquid and bring to a boil.

  2. For better color, add ½ cup of spinach juice before removing from heat.

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. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Peas + minttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Cucumber + spinachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together355 recipes

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

  5. Mint + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together884 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Green peas
Give the soup its main body, flavour and pulped texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavour and mouthfeel of the soup.
Onions
Add savoury aromatic flavour as they soften during boiling and stewing.
Cucumbers
Contribute soft, mild vegetable texture and fresh flavour when stewed.
Spinach juice
Adds green colour to the soup, as the recipe notes it is for better colour.

The step that matters

Pulping the pea liquid through a sieve. Pressing the cooked peas through a sieve breaks down their starch-rich cell walls so the liquid thickens smoothly and the texture is fine rather than grainy.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, mint, onion, cucumber, lettuce, butter, pepper):

  1. Chivefits about as well
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Cauliflowerfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, mint, onion, cucumber, lettuce, butter, 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.

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