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Spanish Soup

A thickened vegetable soup made with onions, celery, lettuce, endive, spinach, herbs, butter, flour, and served over fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Spanish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Thicken 2 quarts of water in a 3-quart saucepan with the bread crumbs.

  2. Cover and boil for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  3. Strain the contents into a basin or back into the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Melt 1.5 ounces of butter in the saucepan, then stir in flour until browned.

  2. Add the shredded vegetables and cook for 5 minutes.

  3. Pour in the strained soup, boil until vegetables are tender, skim, and serve over fried 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.

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. Lettuce + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  2. Endive + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Lettuce + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

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

  4. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 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

Bread crumbs
Thicken the water into a body for the soup.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour and browns with the flour for the base.
Flour
Browned in butter to thicken the soup and add a nutty colour.
Onions
Give the soup its main savoury sweetness as they cook down.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavour and a fresh vegetable note.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Flour cooked in fat must be stirred steadily until it turns evenly golden; if it scorches it turns bitter, and if it is undercooked the soup tastes raw and floury.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, celery, lettuce, endive, spinach, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, celery, lettuce, endive, spinach, 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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