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Celery Soup

A soup made from celery whites, white stock, ham, butter, and optionally cream and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Cut the whites of the celery into small pieces.

  2. Boil the celery in 4 pints of white stock with the ham and butter for 1 hour.

  3. Drain the mixture through a sieve and return the liquid to the pan.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken with flour if desired.

  2. Stir in a few spoonfuls of cream carefully.

  3. Season to taste.

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

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main flavour and body of the soup as it simmers in the stock.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the celery flavour through the soup.
Lean ham
Adds savoury, meaty flavour to the stock during simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the soup.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, silkier texture when stirred in at the end.
Flour
Thickens the soup to a heavier body if added.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream carefully. Cream can curdle or separate when it is boiled or added too hot to a hot, acidic or salty liquid. Stirring it in gently, with the soup off a hard boil, keeps it smooth and evenly blended.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, butter, cream, bread, flour, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, cream, bread, flour, 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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