Name: Parsnip Soup
Ingredients: 1 lb sliced parsnips; 2 oz butter; salt to taste; cayenne to taste; 1 quart stock

Why it works: Parsnip and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,051 recipes. Both carry beta-pinene, which smells pine, resin. The science ↓

Parsnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the parsnips

Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the sliced parsnips.
Cook until the parsnips are tender.
Add nearly 1 pint of stock and boil for 30 minutes.

Strain and finish

Strain the mixture through a fine strainer.
Return the strained soup to the pot and add the remaining stock.
Season to taste, boil again, and serve.

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.

Parsnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,051 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsnips: Form the main body of the soup and give it its sweet, earthy flavour and thickness.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and carries flavour when the parsnips are first cooked.
Stock: Provides the liquid that cooks the parsnips and sets the final volume and moisture of the soup.

“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.