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Summer Soup

A light soup of marrow, endive, onions, chervil, bread, and stock, finished with lemon and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and chervil share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 75 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Summer Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, seed, and chop the vegetable marrows.

  2. Wash and chop the endive.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, combine the marrows, endive, onions, chervil, bread, and stock.

  2. Boil slowly for 1.5 hours.

  3. Add salt, sugar, and cayenne.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  5. Stir in the lemon juice and serve immediately.

  6. Add cream for extra richness, if desired.

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. Endive + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chervil + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together358 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Endive + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Onion + cherviltop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together668 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable marrows
Form the bulk of the soup and give it its body as they soften during the long simmer.
Endive
Adds a slightly bitter, leafy flavour that balances the sweetness of the marrows.
White stock or poultry broth
Provides the liquid base and savoury flavour for the soup.
Bread
Helps thicken the soup as it simmers and breaks down.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the finished soup.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 1.5 hours. A slow simmer softens the vegetables fully and lets their starches and flavours blend into the stock. A hard boil can cloud the soup and reduce it unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (endive, chervil, bread, sugar, lemon, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against endive, chervil, bread, sugar, lemon, cream. 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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