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Welsh Leek Broth or Soup

A soup made with leeks, chicken, celery, herbs, salt, and plums.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,093 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Welsh Leek Broth or Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leeks

  1. Blanch the leeks in boiling water for 5 minutes after cutting off part of the head.

  2. Split each leek in half lengthways and cut one half into 3 or 4 pieces.

Cook the soup

  1. Add the leeks to the chicken in a double stewpan with the water, celery, herbs, and salt.

  2. Boil slowly until the chicken is tender, then add the whole plums.

  3. Keep the saucepan hot but do not overboil the chicken.

  4. After about 30 minutes, remove the chicken, cut it into pieces, and place in a tureen.

  5. Pour the leek broth over the chicken, ensuring the leeks are partly in pulp.

  6. If the broth is too thick, add additional veal or chicken jelly.

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. Leek + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Leek + chickentop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  3. Celery + plumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Leek + plumtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Leeks
Provide the main flavour and, when partly pulped, body to the broth.
Chicken
Supplies the meat and the flavourful stock that the soup is built on.
French plums
Add sweetness and fruity acidity that contrast with the savoury broth.

The step that matters

Keeping the chicken at a gentle simmer. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can cloud the broth, so the chicken should stay just below a rolling boil until tender.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (leek, chicken, celery):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against leek, chicken, celery. 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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