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Hessian Soup and Ragout

A hearty soup made with peas, root vegetables, onions, celery, herbs, and spices, thickened with bread or rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Hessian Soup and Ragout

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Clean the neat's tongue and half an ox's head in salt water, then soak in plain water.

  2. Stew in 5-6 quarts of water until tender.

  3. Let the soup cool, then remove the fat for later use.

Make the soup

  1. Add peas, carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions, herbs, and celery to the soup.

  2. Simmer until vegetables are soft enough to pulp with the peas through a sieve.

  3. Season with pepper, salt, mace, allspice, cloves, and Cayenne.

  4. If the soup is not thick enough, boil in a slice of roll or add rice-flour gradually.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Break down when simmered and pulped, giving the soup its body and thickness.
Potatoes
Soften and break down into the pulp, adding starch that thickens the soup.
Carrots
Soften and pulp through the sieve, adding sweetness and body to the soup.
Onions
Soften and pulp into the soup, adding savoury depth and sweetness as they cook.
Rice-flour
Added gradually to thicken the soup if it is not thick enough.

The step that matters

Adding rice-flour or roll gradually. Starch thickens liquid as it heats, but adding it all at once can form lumps that do not dissolve evenly. Adding it slowly while stirring and boiling lets it disperse and thicken smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, carrot, turnip, potato, onion, celery, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, carrot, turnip, potato, onion, celery, 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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