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Spring Soup

A light vegetable soup made with turnips, carrots, leeks, butter, stock, peas or asparagus tops, served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek 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 ↓

Spring Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash and peel the turnips, then cut them into shreds.

  2. Cut the carrots into shreds and the leeks into 1-inch pieces, then shred them lengthwise.

Cook the soup

  1. In a frying pan, heat the butter and add the shredded vegetables, browning them slightly.

  2. Add the pint of hot water or soup stock and simmer for half an hour.

  3. Stir in the quart of stock and the boiled peas or asparagus tops.

Serve

  1. Place snippets of toast in a tureen and pour the soup over them to 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 + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Leek + peastop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together249 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peastop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,994 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Provide the main body and mild sweetness of the soup as they soften in liquid.
Carrots
Add sweetness and color while softening into the broth.
Leeks
Contribute a mild onion-like aroma and savory depth to the soup.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the vegetables brown slightly in the pan.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables in butter. Browning slightly in butter builds deeper, toasted flavors through the Maillard reaction. Letting them scorch, however, makes the soup bitter, so keep the heat moderate and stir often.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, leek, butter):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, leek, butter. 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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