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Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with onions, potatoes, carrots, turnips, celery, and herbs, simmered in butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the onions, potatoes, carrots, and turnips.

  2. Fry the vegetables in the butter, then pour in the cold water.

  3. Toast the slice of bread until brown and hard, but not burnt.

Simmer and strain

  1. Add the toasted bread, celery, soup herbs, pepper, and salt to the pot.

  2. Stew gently for 4 hours, then strain through a coarse cloth.

  3. If desired, add sliced carrots, celery, and turnips to the soup and stew until tender.

  4. Optionally, add a spoonful of ketchup or any sauce for extra flavor.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Break down during stewing to give the soup its body and sweetness.
Potatoes
Break down during long stewing, thickening the soup and adding body.
Butter
Fat for frying the vegetables, carrying flavor and helping them brown lightly.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and color to the broth as they soften.
Turnips
Add earthy flavor and soft texture as they cook down into the broth.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 4 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavor from the vegetables slowly and keeps the broth clear. A hard boil can break the soup cloudy and make the vegetables fall apart unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, carrot, turnip, butter, bread, celery, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, carrot, turnip, butter, bread, celery, pepper. 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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