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Soup Without Meat

A hearty vegetable soup made with onions, celery, lettuce, spinach, and egg yolks, seasoned with salt, pepper, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 427 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Soup Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the vegetables

  1. Heat the butter in a large pot.

  2. Add the diced onions, celery, shredded lettuce, and spinach.

  3. Cover and cook slowly for about 30 minutes.

  4. Add the boiling water along with salt and pepper.

  5. Simmer gently until all vegetables are tender.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and gradually mix in a few tablespoons of the boiling soup.

  2. Stir the egg mixture back into the pot and cook gently for a few minutes to cook the eggs.

  3. Adjust seasoning with salt, pepper, and vinegar to taste, then serve.

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. Lettuce + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  4. Celery + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together616 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and carries flavour as they cook gently.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup gently and add richness when stirred in and heated.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the cooked vegetables.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture back into the pot. Eggs thicken when warmed gently but can scramble if the soup is too hot. Tempering with hot soup first and cooking gently keeps the mixture smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, celery, lettuce, spinach, vinegar, egg, pepper):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, celery, lettuce, spinach, vinegar, egg, pepper. 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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