Skip to main content
Main

Carrot Soup

A stew of carrots, turnips, onions, and stock, seasoned with thyme, salt, and pepper, optionally finished with milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Carrot Soup

Why it works: Lemon and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,973 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Carrot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Brush and scrape the carrots and turnips, then peel the onions.

  2. Cut all the vegetables into pieces.

Cook and strain

  1. Stew them with the dripping and water (or stock) for three hours.

  2. Pass the mixture through a colander.

Season and serve

  1. Add the thyme, salt, and pepper.

  2. Boil for ten minutes, stirring often.

  3. Remove the thyme and serve.

  4. Add a little milk for improved flavor, if desired.

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. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 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

Carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness and color of the soup.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body to the vegetable base.
Onions
Add savory depth and aroma as they soften during stewing.
Stock
Supplies liquid and savory flavor for stewing the vegetables.
Milk
Adds richness and a softer, rounder mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stew the vegetables for three hours. Long, gentle stewing softens the fibrous vegetables fully so they break down into a smooth purée when strained. Undercooked pieces will leave the soup grainy and thin in flavor.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, pepper, lemon, thyme, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, pepper, lemon, thyme, milk. 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 carrot soup recipes

Puree 5with Rice 3Creamy 3 See all 219 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes