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Potato Soup

A creamy potato soup made with boiled potatoes, celery, onion, mace, milk, butter, salt, pepper, and topped with parsley and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Potato Soup

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the potatoes, celery, onion, and mace in just enough water to cover them for 45 minutes.

  2. Mash the potatoes and strain them through a colander into 3 pints of boiling milk.

  3. Add butter, salt, and pepper to the mixture and bring the soup to a boil 2 or 3 times.

Serve

  1. Serve in a tureen garnished with grated parsley and whipped cream.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  4. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Break down when mashed and strained, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and adds creaminess and richness to the soup.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother mouthfeel and a rounded, rich flavor.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavor to the cooking liquid that carries into the soup.
Onion
Adds aromatic savory flavor to the cooking liquid that carries into the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the strained potatoes to boiling milk. Hot milk should be added to the potato mixture while it is boiling so the soup stays hot and smooth. Repeated boiling then heats the soup through, while adding cold milk could cool it and leave it uneven.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, celery, onion, milk, butter, pepper, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, celery, onion, milk, butter, pepper, parsley. 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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