Skip to main content
Main

White Vegetable Soup

A clear vegetable soup made with potatoes, onions, carrots, turnips, sago, and milk, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Prepare the carrot, turnip, onion, and potatoes, cutting them into very fine dice.

  2. Melt the dripping in a pot.

  3. Add the diced vegetables and sweat for about 20 minutes.

  4. Add the water and season with salt and pepper.

  5. Bring to a boil.

  6. Simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 2 hours.

Thicken and finish

  1. Wash the sago.

  2. Mix the sago with a little water.

  3. Add the sago mixture to the soup and simmer until clear and transparent, about 20 minutes.

  4. Add the milk.

  5. Reheat the soup.

  6. Place chopped parsley in a tureen.

  7. Pour the soup over the parsley.

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. 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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 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

Potatoes
Break down during simmering to give the soup body and a thick, smooth texture.
Sago
Becomes clear and thickens the soup as its starch gelatinises during simmering.
Milk
Adds richness and a mild creamy flavour to the soup.
Dripping or margarine
Provides fat for sweating the vegetables, carrying flavour and softening them.
Onions
Sweat in fat to build a sweet, savoury base for the soup.

The step that matters

Simmering the sago until clear. Sago must be simmered long enough for its starch to fully cook and turn clear and transparent. Undercooked sago stays cloudy and tastes raw, and it can clump if added without being mixed smoothly with water first.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, carrot, turnip, pepper, milk, 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

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes