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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with onions, butter, various shredded vegetables, and optional rice or pearl barley, simmered for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Leek and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 112 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, brown the onion in the butter.

  2. Add the turnips, parsnips, leeks, carrots, white carrot, celery, sorrel, potato, French beans, and green peas, then toss and brown the vegetables in the butter, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  3. Pour in a little water or stock and crush the vegetables slightly.

  4. Fill up with more water and let the soup simmer for two hours.

  5. Optionally, add rice or pearl barley for extra texture.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Leek + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 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

Butter
Browns the onion and vegetables, adding richness and a deeper savoury flavour.
Onion
Browning in butter builds sweet, savoury flavour as the base of the soup.
Potato
Breaks down partly during simmering, thickening the soup and adding body.
Carrots
Soften during simmering, adding natural sweetness and colour to the soup.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables in butter. Browning caramelises the natural sugars and proteins in the vegetables, building deeper flavour. Pale, steamed vegetables give a flatter, blander soup.

Swap the onion

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

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

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