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A Cheap Soup

A hearty soup of haricot beans, carrots, onions, turnips, cabbages, and rice, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Cheap Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the haricot beans overnight in 1 gallon of water.

  2. Add the carrots, onions, turnips, and cabbages to the beans.

Cook

  1. Stir in the Patna rice, salt, and black pepper.

  2. Stew the mixture for 4 to 5 hours, stirring occasionally.

  3. Optionally add 1 lb of dripping or fiber from the stock-pot for extra flavor.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beans + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,017 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 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

Haricot beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they cook down.
Patna rice
Adds starch that thickens the broth and gives the soup body.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body as they soften during the long stew.
Onions
Add savoury depth and sweetness as they cook down into the broth.
Turnips
Contribute mild sweetness and soften into the stew.
Dripping or stock-pot fiber
Adds fat and richness, giving the soup more flavour and mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stewing the mixture for 4 to 5 hours. Dried beans need prolonged gentle simmering to become fully tender. Cooking too briefly leaves them firm, while stirring occasionally keeps the rice and vegetables from sticking and scorching on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, carrot, turnip, cabbage, rice, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, turnip, cabbage, rice, pepper. 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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