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Soup

Summer Soup

A light vegetable soup with onions, carrots, turnips, lettuce, watercress, peas, and herbs, simmered in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Summer Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and chop the onions, carrots, turnips, lettuce, watercress, and shallot.

Make the soup

  1. Place the chopped vegetables in a stewpan with the butter and cook until the onions are browned.

  2. Add the stock and simmer gently for about 2 hours.

  3. Stir in the peas and continue to simmer until they are tender.

  4. Season with pepper and salt to taste, then serve.

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. Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Watercress + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 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

Onions
Browning in butter builds deep, savoury flavour as the sugars caramelise.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives the soup a rich mouthfeel.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the vegetables' flavour through the long simmer.
Peas
Add sweetness and a fresh, green flavour, softening gently in the broth.

The step that matters

Browning the onions. Cooking the onions until golden, not just softened, lets their sugars caramelise and creates the savoury depth the soup depends on. Pale onions give a flatter, less rounded flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, lettuce, watercress, shallot, parsley, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Endivefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, lettuce, watercress, shallot, parsley, butter. 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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