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Periwinkle Soup

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

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 the periwinkles

  1. Wash the periwinkles well.

  2. Boil the periwinkles in a saucepan with a handful of salt.

Make the soup

  1. Heat the dripping or butter in another saucepan.

  2. Fry the onion or carrot, parsley, and thyme until browned.

  3. Add 1 pint of water to the browned mixture.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  5. Add the picked periwinkles, pepper, and salt.

  6. Let the soup 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 sea flavour of the soup.
Dripping or butter
Carries the aromatics and adds richness and fat to the broth.
Onion or carrot
Browning adds sweetness and savoury depth to the base.

The step that matters

Fry the onion or carrot, parsley, and thyme until browned. Browning the aromatics through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation builds the savoury, sweet depth of the broth. Pale, under-fried aromatics give a flat, raw-tasting soup.

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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