Skip to main content

Spring Soup

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Kale and chive share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash and pick a bunch of spring onions, carrots, lettuces, chervil, spinach, parsley, thyme, sorrel, mint, and asparagus.

  2. In a stewpan, melt a slice of butter and add the vegetables; let them sweat for 1 hour over medium heat, stirring occasionally.

  3. Soak French rolls in water, then squeeze them dry to thicken the soup.

  4. Add mushroom trimmings and fill the pan with good broth; let it nearly boil, then skim the surface.

  5. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve, season with salt and sugar, and garnish with asparagus points or croutons.

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. Kale + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chive + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together244 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Kale + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together98 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mustard + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Mustard + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the cucumber

The recipe marks cucumber as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (kale, mustard, chive, onion, capsicum, butter, mushroom):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against kale, mustard, chive, onion, capsicum, butter, mushroom. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

More spring vegetable soup recipes

Thick 3 See all 46 →

You might also like

Asparagus SoupAsparagus Soup179 recipesAsparagus SaladAsparagus Salad77 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesCream of AsparagusCream of Asparagus38 recipes