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Soup

Julienne Soup

A vegetable soup made with finely shredded carrots, turnip, onion, leek, celery, cabbage lettuce, butter, Marmite, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Julienne Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash, trim, scrape, or peel the vegetables and cut them into very fine shreds or strips of even length.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter over medium heat without letting it brown.

  2. Dissolve the Marmite in hot water and add it to the vegetables.

  3. Cook until the vegetables are tender, skimming off any scum that forms.

Season and serve

  1. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and castor sugar. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Leek + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Butter
Melted gently without browning, it adds richness and a rounded flavour to the broth.
Marmite
Dissolved in the water, it adds savoury, salty depth to the soup.
Cabbage lettuce
Shredded leafy greens that soften during cooking and add body and mild flavour.
Leek
Adds a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma as it softens in the butter and water.

The step that matters

Melt the butter without browning. Browned butter takes on a nutty, bitter flavour that changes the soup's clean taste. Gentle heat keeps the butter's flavour mild and the vegetables tender rather than fried.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, leek, celery, cabbage, lettuce, 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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