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Vegetable Soup Without Meat

A hearty vegetable soup made with carrots, celery, sweet potato, turnip, parsnip, white potato, rice, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the vegetables into dice.

  2. Heat the butter in a frying pan and add all the vegetables except the white potato. Fry until light brown.

  3. Transfer the vegetables and butter to a soup kettle.

Simmer and serve

  1. Add the cold water, rice, bay leaf, salt, parsley, and celery.

  2. Let the mixture boil slowly for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  3. Add the white potato and boil for an additional 15 minutes.

  4. Season to taste 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 + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Sweet potato + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Rice
Thickens the broth as its starch softens during the long simmer.
Butter
Carries fat for frying the vegetables, adding richness and browning flavor.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma as it softens and browns in the butter.
Sweet potato
Breaks down during simmering, adding body and natural sweetness to the soup.

The step that matters

Fry the vegetables until light brown. Browning in butter builds deeper flavor through the Maillard reaction and caramelization. Pale, undercooked frying leaves the soup tasting flat and raw-vegetable-like.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, sweet potato, butter, turnip, rice, parsnip):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, sweet potato, butter, turnip, rice, parsnip. 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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