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Vegetable Soup

A clear vegetable soup made with butter, flour, water, onion, turnip, carrot, tomatoes, and cayenne pepper, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Vegetable 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 ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Blend butter with flour in a pot.

  2. Pour boiling water into the pot, stirring constantly.

  3. Cook for 15 minutes.

  4. Add quartered onion, turnip, carrot, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  5. Boil for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Skim out the vegetables, then add tomatoes.

  2. Boil for 15 to 20 minutes.

  3. Strain the soup and serve with minced parsley stirred in.

  4. Pass small oyster crackers or Saratoga chips with the soup.

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. Turnip + carrottop 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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor through the broth.
Flour
Thickens the broth as it cooks, giving it body.
Onion, turnip, and carrot
Provide the main vegetable flavor and sweetness as they simmer.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and a fresher, brighter tomato flavor to the soup.

The step that matters

Blend butter with flour before adding the water. Cooking the flour briefly in fat and then whisking in liquid keeps it from clumping, so the soup thickens smoothly instead of becoming lumpy.

Swap the tomato

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

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

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

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