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Vegetable Soup

A soup made from turnip, carrot, onion, celery, and butter, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Combine turnip, carrot, onion, celery, and 2 quarts of water in a pot.

  2. Boil until vegetables are tender and water is nearly absorbed.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve into a clean pot.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the remaining 3 pints of water and bring to a boil.

  2. Soften the butter with a little hot soup.

  3. Mix the softened butter with flour, salt, and pepper until smooth.

  4. Stir the butter mixture into the boiling soup.

  5. Let the soup boil for 2-3 minutes before serving.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

Turnip
Provides the bulk and mild, sweet body of the soup once puréed.
Carrot
Adds sweetness, color and body to the sieved vegetable base.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the finished soup a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when mixed with butter and stirred into the boiling liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour mixture into the boiling soup. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid, and dropping it into a rolling boil without first blending it smooth can leave lumps. Softening the butter and mixing it until smooth lets the flour disperse evenly before it thickens the soup.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, celery, flour, 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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