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Spring Soup Without Meat

A hearty vegetable soup made with lettuce, cabbage, carrot, turnip, onion, leeks, celery, cauliflower, butter, and croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spring Soup Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cauliflower into small pieces and set aside the florets.

  2. Chop the tender part of the stalk into small pieces.

  3. Prepare the rest of the vegetables and shred them finely.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a large stewpan, add the shredded vegetables and cauliflower stalk, and cook without browning for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the water, salt, and pepper, and cook gently until tender, about 1 hour.

  3. Twenty minutes before serving, add the cauliflower florets.

Serve

  1. Cut 2 or 3 slices of well-browned toast into small dice and place them in the serving tureen.

  2. Adjust seasoning as necessary and 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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lettuce + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lettuce + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melted fat that softens the vegetables gently in the pan and carries flavour.
Cauliflower
Adds body and a mild flavour; the florets are added late so they stay tender.
Leeks
Add a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma as they cook slowly in butter.
Celery
Contributes aromatic flavour and a fresh, slightly savoury note to the broth.
Cabbage
Shredded and cooked until tender, it adds bulk, texture and a mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables without browning. Sweating the shredded vegetables in butter over gentle heat softens them and builds flavour; browning would give a darker, more bitter taste than this light soup should have.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, cabbage, carrot, turnip, leek, celery, cauliflower):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Endivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, cabbage, carrot, turnip, leek, celery, cauliflower. 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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