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Carrot Soup

A soup made with grated carrots, ham, onion, stock, milk, margarine, flour, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Carrot 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 ↓

Carrot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate the carrots, chop the ham and onion, and place them in a pan with the margarine.

Simmer the soup

  1. Cook gently for 20 minutes, then add the stock, seasoning, and parsley.

  2. Simmer gently for one hour.

Thicken and serve

  1. Blend the flour with the milk, add some soup to this mixture, and return it to the pan.

  2. Stir until boiling.

  3. Boil for a few minutes 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 + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Form the main body of the soup and give it its sweet flavour and colour.
Flour
Thickens the soup with the milk, giving it a smoother, heavier body.
Milk
Adds richness and softness, rounding out the flavour and texture of the soup.
Margarine
Fat that softens the onion and carrots and carries flavour at the start of cooking.

The step that matters

Blending the flour with the milk before adding it to the soup. Flour added dry or unmixed clumps and stays lumpy. Blending it smoothly with cold milk first lets the starch disperse, so it thickens evenly when the mixture is returned to the hot soup and brought to a boil.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, ham, parsley, milk, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, ham, parsley, milk, flour. 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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