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Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with onions, carrots, turnips, celery, toasted bread, herbs, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a stewpan, combine the onions, carrots, and turnips with the butter and powdered sugar.

  2. Cook over medium heat for 10 minutes without browning the vegetables.

Simmer and serve

  1. Pour in the stock or boiling water, then add the toasted bread, celery, herbs, salt, and pepper.

  2. Simmer for 3 hours, skimming off any foam that forms.

  3. Strain the soup before serving, adding sliced carrot, celery, and turnip for garnish.

  4. Flavor with a spoonful of Harvey's sauce or a little ketchup 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.

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries flavor and gives the vegetables a rich, smooth base while they soften.
Onions
Build the aromatic base of the soup, adding savory depth as they soften.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the broth as they cook down.
Turnips
Contribute a mild, slightly peppery flavor and body to the soup.
Toasted bread
Thickens the soup slightly as it softens and absorbs liquid.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables without browning them. Gently softening the vegetables in butter draws out their sweetness while keeping the soup pale and mild. Browning would add bitter, toasted notes that change the flavor.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, butter, bread, celery, 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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