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Soup

A hearty beef and vegetable soup with carrots, parsnips, turnips, cabbage, parsley, thyme, onion, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pot, heat lard and sprinkle in flour.

  2. Add carrots, parsnips, turnips, cabbage, parsley, thyme, onion, beef, allspice, and cloves.

  3. Brown the beef, then add boiling water to reach desired soup strength.

  4. Once cooked, strain through a sieve.

  5. Use the water from the bouillon for the best 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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Parsnip + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together270 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main meat flavor and savory richness as it browns and simmers.
Flour
Heated with the lard, it helps thicken the soup base slightly.
Lard
Adds fat for browning the beef and carrying the aromatic flavors.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth as it cooks into the soup base.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and body to the broth.
Parsnips
Add earthy sweetness and body as they soften during cooking.

The step that matters

Brown the beef. Browning creates deeper savory flavor through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pot or adding water too soon causes the meat to steam instead, leaving the soup flatter in flavor.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, carrot, parsnip, turnip, cabbage, parsley, thyme):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, carrot, parsnip, turnip, cabbage, parsley, thyme. 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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