Skip to main content
Main

Potage a l’Eau.—Water Soup

A vegetable soup made by simmering cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips, onion, celery, parsley, sorrel, beet stalks, chervil, and peas in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potage a l’Eau.—Water Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips, onion, celery, parsley, sorrel, beet stalks, and chervil, and tie them together.

Simmer

  1. Place the tied vegetables in a stewpot with 3 pints of water.

  2. Add the peas tied in a cloth and boil for 3 hours over low heat, adding more water as needed.

Finish

  1. Season with coarse sea salt to taste and strain the soup, reserving any vegetables you wish to serve.

  2. Optionally, purée the peas before adding them to the soup.

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 + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Adds body and a sweet, mellow vegetable flavour to the broth.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and colour to the broth.
Peas
Add starch and body, thickening the soup as they break down.
Sorrel
Adds a bright, sharp acidity that lifts the flavour of the broth.

The step that matters

Simmering for 3 hours over low heat. A gentle, long simmer slowly extracts flavour from the vegetables without boiling them to mush. Keeping the heat low and topping up water prevents the pot from scorching or the broth from reducing too far.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, carrot, parsnip, turnip, celery, parsley, sorrel):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, carrot, parsnip, turnip, celery, parsley, sorrel. 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

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipes