Name: Carrot and Turnip Soup
Ingredients: 3 ounces fresh butter; 3 cups carrots, cut into small squares; 3 cups turnips, cut into small squares; water; 2 onions, sliced; 1 teacup bread crumbs; salt; Cayenne or black pepper

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 ↓

Carrot and Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the butter in a 3-quart saucepan.
Add the carrots and turnips, and sauté for 10-15 minutes.
Pour in enough water to nearly fill the saucepan.
Let it stew gently for 1 hour.
Add the sliced onions and stew for an additional 2 hours.
Stir in the bread crumbs, salt, and pepper 15 minutes 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.

Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,555 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots: Soften during stewing and give the soup body and natural sweetness.
Turnips: Soften during stewing and add body and a mildly peppery flavour.
Onions: Break down during long stewing, adding savoury depth and sweetness to the broth.
Bread crumbs: Absorb liquid and thicken the soup slightly when stirred in near the end.

Swap the onion

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

Leekfits better
Parsnipfits better
Spinachfits better
Onionthe original

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