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Soupe Aux Choux Et Au Lard

A hearty French soup made with cabbage, bacon, root vegetables, and onion, served with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soupe Aux Choux Et Au Lard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Add 1 pound of bacon and boil for 1 hour.

  3. Soak the cabbage in hot water for 30 minutes or cold water for 4 hours, then drain.

  4. Cut the carrot in half and then into quarters.

Make the soup

  1. Add the cabbage to the saucepan after the bacon has boiled for 1 hour.

  2. Add the carrot, turnips, leek, celery, and onion with cloves to the saucepan.

  3. Let the mixture simmer for 2.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Cut the cabbage into quarters and place some pieces in a soup tureen with thin slices of bread.

  2. Pour some broth over the bread, cover, and serve hot.

  3. Serve the bacon in the center of a hot dish with the cabbage quarters, carrot, and turnip.

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 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

Bacon
Adds smoky, salty flavour and fat to the broth as it cooks.
Savoy cabbage
Provides the main body of the soup and soaks up flavour from the broth.
Bread
Soaks up broth in the tureen, giving the dish a soft, filling texture.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body to the broth during the long simmer.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, carrot, turnip, leek, celery, onion, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, carrot, turnip, leek, celery, onion, bread. 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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