Skip to main content
Main

Vegetable Marrow Soup

A soup made from vegetable marrow, onion, butter, flour, milk, and water, thickened with a flour‑milk paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Vegetable Marrow Soup

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and cut the marrow into squares.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the marrow, onion, sugar, butter, and a little salt and pepper.

Cook the soup

  1. Cover and simmer for about 10 minutes.

  2. Add the boiling water and stew slowly for 20 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the flour with a little milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. Add the remaining milk and stir it into the soup.

  3. Continue stirring until it boils, season to taste, and serve with small squares of toast.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable marrow
Forms the bulk of the soup and softens into a tender, mild body as it stews.
Flour
Thickens the milk and soup into a smooth, creamy consistency when stirred and boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour as the vegetables cook gently in it.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body, and helps the flour thicken the soup.
Onion
Contributes savoury, aromatic flavour to the soup base.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with milk before adding it. Flour stirred directly into hot liquid clumps, so it is first blended into a smooth paste with a little cold milk. Stirring the soup constantly as it comes to a boil then lets the starch thicken it evenly without lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sugar, milk, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, milk, 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes