Name: Garbure Soup
Ingredients: 5 quarts water; 1 small cabbage; 6 medium potatoes; 2 leeks; 1 turnip; 1 carrot; 1 large onion; ½ pint haricot beans (soaked overnight); 1½ pounds knuckle of beef or veal, or ½ pound streaky bacon (blanched for 3 minutes)

Why it works: Leek and turnip 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 ↓

Garbure Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Bring 5 quarts of water to a boil in a large stewpan.
Clean the cabbage and cut it into quarters.
Slice the potatoes, leeks (into ½ inch lengths), turnip and carrot.
Finely chop the onion.
Wash all vegetables.

Cook

Add the vegetables to the boiling water.
Add the soaked haricot beans and your choice of meat for flavor.
Cook gently until the vegetables are tender.

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.

Leek + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,046 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Leek + carrottop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,310 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Leek + beanstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together51 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans: Add body and a creamy texture to the soup as they cook through.
Potatoes: Break down slightly as they cook, thickening the broth and giving it body.
Beef or veal knuckle: Releases savory flavor and gelatin into the water, enriching the broth.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, leek, turnip, carrot, onion, beans, beef):

Parsnipfits better
Chivefits better
Beetrootfits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, leek, turnip, carrot, onion, beans, beef. 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.