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Dessert

Cressi Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with carrots, turnips, leeks, celery, onions, ham, and consommé, served with fried croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cressi Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash and mince the carrots, turnips, leeks, celery, and onions.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the ham.

  2. Layer the minced vegetables over the ham, cover, and cook on low heat for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.

  3. Add the consommé and bring to a slow boil for 1 hour.

  4. Skim off any fat and strain the soup through a fine sieve.

  5. Return the soup to the stewpan and keep warm while you prepare the croutons.

Make the croutons and serve

  1. Cut the bread into small squares and fry in butter until golden.

  2. Serve the soup with the croutons added.

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 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

Carrots
Provide body, sweetness and colour to the soup as they cook down with the other vegetables.
Leeks
Add a mild onion-like aroma and savoury depth to the base.
Lean ham
Releases savoury flavour into the butter and vegetables during the slow start.
Consommé
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying the flavour of the vegetables and ham.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping to carry flavour from the ham and vegetables.

The step that matters

Layering the vegetables over the ham and cooking on low heat. Gentle, covered cooking softens the vegetables and draws out their flavour without browning or scorching them on the base of the pan. Too much heat can stick and burn the minced vegetables before the soup is built.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, leek, celery, butter, ham, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, leek, celery, butter, ham, bread. 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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