Skip to main content
Main

Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with onions, carrots, turnips, cabbage, tomatoes, and seasoned with butter, flour, pepper, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Vegetable Soup

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 ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Bring 3 quarts of water to a boil in a porcelain kettle.

  2. Add the chopped onions, carrots, and turnips.

  3. Simmer for 30 minutes.

  4. Stir in the chopped cabbage and stewed tomatoes along with a bunch of sweet herbs.

  5. Boil the soup for 20 minutes.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain through a sieve, rubbing the vegetables through.

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and flour.

  3. Season the soup with pepper, salt, and sugar.

  4. Add the sweet cream if using.

  5. Stir in the butter and flour mixture.

  6. Let it boil briefly.

  7. Serve hot with fried bread chips or poached eggs.

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. 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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter and flour
Creamed together and stirred in, they thicken the soup slightly and add richness.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, and rubbed through the sieve they help thicken the soup.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and a smoother, milder finish to the soup.

The step that matters

Stir in the butter and flour mixture. Flour clumps if added raw to hot liquid. Creaming it with butter first and stirring it in, then boiling briefly, lets the starch disperse and thicken the soup evenly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, turnip, cabbage, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, cabbage, butter, flour, 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.

More vegetable soup recipes

Spring 46Beef 45Winter 31French 11Lentil 9Clear 8 See all 425 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipes