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Tomato Soup

A hearty tomato soup with vegetables, seasoned, thickened with butter and flour, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Tomato Soup

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,053 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, combine tomatoes, boiling water, onions, carrot, turnip, parsley, and celery.

  2. Boil for 1 hour, adding more water as needed to maintain the quantity.

  3. Season with salt, sugar, and pepper.

Thicken and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and flour, then add hot soup until it pours easily.

  2. Pour the mixture back into the soup and boil for 5 minutes.

  3. Strain through a sieve and serve with toasted crackers or bread.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the soup.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aroma as they soften during the long boil.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter and hot liquid.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the texture when blended with flour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and butter mixture to the soup. If the hot soup is added too quickly or the flour is not smoothly blended into the butter, lumps form. Adding hot liquid gradually to the paste and then boiling lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the soup smoothly.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, carrot, turnip, parsley, celery, sugar, pepper):

  1. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Okrabetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, carrot, turnip, parsley, celery, sugar, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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