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Cabrot Soup

A thick carrot soup made with mutton or beef broth, carrots, onions, turnip, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Cabrot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a large pot, combine the broth, beef bones, onions, turnip, salt, and pepper.

  2. Simmer for 3 hours.

Add the carrots and finish

  1. Scrape and thinly slice the carrots.

  2. Strain the soup over the carrots and cook until soft enough to puree.

  3. Pass the carrot pulp through a fine sieve or cloth back into the soup.

  4. The soup should be thick like pea soup; add cayenne to taste.

  5. Prepare this soup the day 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. Onion + turniptop 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. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness and colour once cooked and pureed.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aroma to the broth as it simmers.
Turnip
Adds mild earthy flavour and body to the simmered broth.
Beef bones
Add richness and depth of flavour to the broth during long simmering.

The step that matters

Passing the carrot pulp through a fine sieve or cloth. Pressing the cooked carrots through a fine sieve breaks down their fibres and removes skins and stringy bits, giving a smooth, thick texture. Skipping or rushing this leaves the soup grainy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, beef, carrot, turnip, 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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