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Peanut Soup

A savory soup made with veal stock, milk, roasted peanuts, and peanut butter, finished with a thickened sauce and served with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Peanut and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Peanut Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Combine veal stock, milk, butter, and chopped onion in a pot. Season to taste.

  2. Add ground roasted peanuts and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes.

Add the peanut butter and thicken

  1. In a double boiler, mix peanut butter with boiling milk, bay leaf, coarse sea salt, and grated onion. Cook for 6 minutes.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour or cornstarch moistened in cold milk. Cook until smooth.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the soup through a fine sieve and serve immediately with croutons or chopped peanuts.

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. Peanut + wheattop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together151 recipes

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

  2. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Onion + peanuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,043 recipes

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

  5. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Peanuts
Ground peanuts and peanut butter give the soup its body, nutty flavour and richness.
Flour or cornstarch
Starch swells when heated, thickening the soup to a smooth, lightly body-rich texture.
Veal stock
Forms the savoury liquid base that carries the other flavours.
Butter
Adds fat, which carries flavour and gives the soup a rounder mouthfeel.
Milk
Adds liquid and creaminess, softening the soup's texture.

The step that matters

Thickening with moistened flour or cornstarch. Starch must be fully suspended in cold milk before it meets hot liquid, or it clumps. Cooking until smooth lets the starch swell and thicken the soup evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, milk, butter, peanut, flour, wheat):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, milk, butter, peanut, flour, wheat. 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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