Skip to main content
Main

White Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with white beans, onions, carrots, turnips, and stock, thickened with flour and garnished with parsley.

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

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

White Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, combine the soup stock, onions, carrots, turnips, and white beans.

  2. Bring to a boil and cook for 1 hour.

  3. Mix the flour with a little water to moisten it, then add to the soup.

Season and serve

  1. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and sprinkle in some parsley.

  2. Pour the soup into a tureen 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.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 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

White beans
Provide the main body and bulk of the soup as they soften during cooking.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when mixed with water and stirred in.
Onions
Add savory depth and sweetness as they cook down into the broth.

The step that matters

Mix the flour with a little water to moisten it, then add to the soup.. Flour added dry will clump into lumps that stay hard and floury. Moistening it first lets the starch disperse evenly so the soup thickens smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, beans, flour, pepper, parsley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, beans, flour, pepper, parsley. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes