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Periwinkle Soup

A soup made with periwinkles, sea salt, butter, onion or carrot, parsley, thyme, water, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Periwinkle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the periwinkles well.

  2. Boil them in a saucepan with salt to help pick out the fish easily.

Make the soup

  1. In another saucepan, heat dripping or butter with onion or carrot, parsley, and thyme until browned.

  2. Add water to the browned mixture and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the picked periwinkles, pepper, and salt, and let it boil for another 30 minutes.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Periwinkles
Provide the main body and flavour of the soup.
Dripping or butter
Carries flavour and adds richness when heated and browned with the vegetables.
Onion or carrot
Browns to build a sweeter, deeper savoury base for the broth.
Parsley
Adds a fresh, herbal aroma to the browned base.

The step that matters

Boiling the periwinkles to remove the meat. Boiling in salted water loosens the flesh from the shell so it can be picked out cleanly. Undercooked periwinkles hold onto their meat, while overcooking makes it tough and rubbery.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, thyme, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, thyme, 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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