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A Nutritious Cottage Soup

A hearty soup of mutton, rice, carrots, turnip, and onions simmered in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 Nutritious Cottage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Heat the drippings in a large saucepan until hot.

  2. Add the mutton pieces and bones, frying them while turning with a spoon.

  3. Add the diced carrot, turnip, and chopped onions, stirring well.

  4. Mix in the washed rice, sugar, and salt, and stir for more than 5 minutes.

Simmer and serve

  1. Pour in the water or stock, cover, and bring to a boil.

  2. Reduce heat and simmer for just over an hour.

  3. Season with pepper and additional salt to taste before serving.

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 + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Rice + carrottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Neck of mutton
Provides meat and bones that flavour the broth as they simmer.
Rice
Thickens the soup as its starch releases during simmering.
Onions
Build savoury sweetness and aroma as they soften in the fat.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body to the broth as it cooks.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and body to the broth as it cooks.

The step that matters

Frying the mutton and vegetables in the drippings. Browning the meat and onions in hot fat creates savoury, roasted flavours through the Maillard reaction. Pale, under-browned pieces give a flatter, blander broth.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, rice, carrot, turnip, sugar, 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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