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Chicken Soup

A hearty chicken soup with rice, onion, celery, turnip, carrot, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Chicken Soup

Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Chicken Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut up the chicken and break the bones.

  2. Cook the chicken in 3 quarts of water until very tender.

  3. Add water as it boils away.

  4. Remove the meat and bones from the kettle.

Make the stock

  1. Pour the soup into an earthen dish and let it cool.

  2. Remove all fat from the stock.

  3. Return the stock to a saucepan.

Finish the soup

  1. Wash the rice and add ½ cup of rice to the soup.

  2. In a pan, fry the chopped onion, celery, turnip, and carrot in a little butter.

  3. Add the fried vegetables to the soup.

  4. Boil slowly for 1 hour.

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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole chicken
Gives the stock its meat flavour and body as it cooks down.
Rice
Thickens the soup slightly as its starch releases during simmering.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth once softened in butter.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and colour to the broth.
Celery
Contributes savoury, aromatic flavour to the soup base.

The step that matters

Remove all fat from the stock. Fat that is not skimmed after cooling forms a greasy layer and makes the soup taste heavy. Chilling or cooling the stock lets the fat rise and solidify so it can be lifted off cleanly.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, rice, onion, celery, carrot, butter, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, rice, onion, celery, carrot, butter, pepper. 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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