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Vegetable Soup-Stock

A clear stock made by simmering carrots, celery, turnips, onions, lettuce, parsnips, and herbs with butter, water, and seasonings.

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-Stock

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and cut the carrots, celery, turnips, onions, lettuce, parsnips, and herbs.

Make the stock

  1. In a stewpan, combine the vegetables with fresh butter and a little water.

  2. Stew until the water evaporates and the butter begins to hiss.

  3. Fill the pan with fresh water, then add nutmeg, pepper, salt, and green peas.

  4. Simmer for three hours.

  5. Strain the stock and store in a stone crock in a cool place until needed.

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. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 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

Carrots
Provide sweetness and body to the stock as they simmer.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma as they soften and release sugars.
Celery
Contributes aromatic flavour that rounds out the stock.
Butter
Carries flavour from the vegetables and adds richness when stewed first.

The step that matters

Stew until the water evaporates and the butter begins to hiss. Cooking the vegetables in butter until the water is gone lets them brown slightly and concentrate flavour. Adding water too early would simply boil them, producing a flatter stock.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Endivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, turnip, lettuce, parsnip, butter, nutmeg. 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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