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Canned Tomato Soup

A canned tomato soup made by boiling tomatoes, celery, parsley, bay leaves, cloves, onions, then thickening with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Canned Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the tomatoes until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Boil the celery, parsley, bay leaves, cloves, and onions together.

  3. Add the boiled mixture to the tomatoes and strain through a cloth.

  4. Thicken the soup with butter and flour.

  5. Stir in salt, sugar, and paprika.

Jar and serve

  1. Pour the hot soup into glass jars.

  2. When ready to serve, add cream to each pint of 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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  3. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the soup and provide its main flavour and liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and smoothing the texture.
Flour
Thickens the soup with butter into a smoother, heavier body.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma as they cook into the base.
Celery
Contributes aromatic background flavour to the soup base.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the tomatoes with a touch of sweetness.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with butter and flour. Flour added to hot liquid can clump if not blended in first, leaving lumps. Cooking the flour briefly in butter helps it dissolve evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, celery, parsley, clove, butter, flour, sugar):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, celery, parsley, clove, butter, flour, sugar. 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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