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Purine of Carrot

A thick carrot purée soup with onions, turnip, parsley, corned beef, cream, stock, and flour.

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

Purine of Carrot

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

  1. Combine the carrots, onion, turnip, parsley, corned beef, cream, water or soup stock, and flour in a pot, mixing smoothly.

  2. Cook until the carrots are tender.

  3. Add 5 pints of stock, season with salt and sugar, and boil for 15 minutes.

Strain and serve

  1. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve 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.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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 bulk of the purée and its natural sweetness and body.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the purée a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.
Flour
Starch thickens the liquid so the purée holds more body.
Corned beef
Adds savory, salty flavor to the purée.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the savory elements.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour smoothly into the liquid. Flour starch clumps when it hits hot liquid unevenly, leaving lumps. Whisking it smoothly into the cold mixture first disperses the starch so it thickens evenly as the mixture cooks.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, parsley, beef, cream, flour, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsley, beef, cream, flour, sugar. 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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