Name: Stock for Clear Soups
Ingredients: 4 onions; 1 gallon water; 1 carrot; 2 small turnips; 2 parsnips; 3 bay leaves; 1 head celery (or 1 teaspoon celery seeds); ⅛ head cabbage

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 ↓

Stock for Clear Soups

1 gallon of strong stock

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

Place the onions in a large kettle with the water.
Boil steadily for 2 hours.
Add the carrot, turnips, parsnips, bay leaves, celery, and cabbage.
Boil for 4 more hours.
Strain the stock.

Finish

This should yield 1 gallon of strong stock.

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.

Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together590 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,097 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 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

Onions: Release sweet, savoury flavour into the water over a long simmer.
Carrot: Adds subtle sweetness and aroma to the stock as it simmers.
Parsnips: Contribute natural sweetness and body to the simmered broth.
Celery: Adds a fresh, aromatic vegetable flavour to the stock.

Swap the onion

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

Leekfits better
Beetrootfits better
Lettucefits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsnip, celery, cabbage. 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.