Skip to main content
Main

Parker House Soup

A hearty beef soup with carrots, turnips, beet, onions, tomatoes, and a butter‑flour roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Parker House Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Combine beef stock, carrot, turnip, beet, onions, and tomatoes in a large pot.

  2. Boil the mixture for 1 hour, then strain it.

Make the roux and finish

  1. Heat butter in a pan until light brown, then remove the pan from heat.

  2. Stir flour into the browned butter until well mixed, then add this mixture to the strained soup.

  3. Season the soup with salt, pepper, and sugar.

  4. Return the soup to the heat and stir until it boils for 5 minutes, skimming off any foam.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

What each ingredient does

Beef stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the vegetables.
Butter
Browned to add a nutty aroma and fat for the thickening roux.
Flour
Mixed with the browned butter to thicken the soup.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body to the soup.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aroma as they cook into the stock.

The step that matters

Stir flour into the browned butter until well mixed. Flour lumps form if it is not fully blended into the fat before it meets the hot soup, and a properly mixed roux thickens the soup evenly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, onion, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, butter, flour, 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes