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Good and Cheap Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with potatoes, turnips, carrots, onions, celery, mushrooms, bread, and seasonings, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Good and Cheap Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the vegetables and cut them into small pieces.

  2. Toast the bread until brown and add it to a stewpan with the vegetables, water, and seasonings.

Cook and strain

  1. Simmer gently for 3 hours, or until everything is reduced to a pulp.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve until it resembles pea soup in consistency and is a dark brown color.

Serve

  1. Reheat when needed, adding the Harvey's sauce and adjusting seasoning if necessary.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 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

Potatoes
Break down during long simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Turnips
Soften into the pulp that gives the soup its body and mild sweetness.
Carrots
Break down to add sweetness and color to the soup.
Onions
Add savory depth and sweetness as they cook down into the base.
Bread
Toasting browns it for color and roasty flavor, and it helps thicken the soup.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 3 hours. A gentle simmer lets the vegetables break down fully without scorching on the bottom of the pot. Scorching would give a burnt taste and dark specks that a sieve cannot remove.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, turnip, carrot, mushroom, celery, bread, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, turnip, carrot, mushroom, celery, bread, 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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