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Creole Soup

A thickened soup of green peppers, onions, tomatoes, and macaroni, seasoned with salt, pepper, cayenne, horseradish, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Creole Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cook the green peppers and onion in butter for 5 minutes.

  2. Add flour and blend thoroughly.

  3. Add stock and tomatoes, and simmer for 15 minutes.

  4. Press the mixture through a sieve.

  5. Season the mixture.

  6. Reheat the mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. Add horseradish and vinegar.

  2. Add cooked macaroni cut into rings.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 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
Fat that softens the peppers and onion and carries their flavour into the soup.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, body-rich soup as it cooks.
Brown stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup and supplies most of its savoury flavour.
Tomatoes
Add acidity, colour and body to the soup base.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent bite that stands out against the soup's richness.
Macaroni
Adds starchy pasta rings that give the soup substance and texture.

The step that matters

Press the mixture through a sieve. Pressing the cooked peppers, onion and tomatoes through a sieve breaks down their fibres and removes lumps, so the soup turns smooth and evenly thickened rather than grainy.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, onion, flour, horseradish, vinegar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, onion, flour, horseradish, vinegar. 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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