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Carrot Soup with Rice

A soup of carrots, turnips, onions, ham, and butter simmered in stock, served over boiled rice.

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

Carrot Soup with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash, clean, and prepare the carrots, turnips, and onions.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, combine the vegetables, celery seed in a muslin bag, and ham with the butter.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until browned.

  3. Gradually add the stock and simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Press the mixture through a coarse sieve and return to the saucepan.

  5. Season with salt and pepper, and boil for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup over boiled rice in a tureen.

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 + 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness and colour of the soup.
Turnips
Add earthy bulk and body as they soften during simmering.
Butter
Carries fat and flavour and helps the vegetables brown in the first cooking.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that the vegetables soften in and become a soup.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables with butter. Cooking over medium heat while stirring keeps the vegetables from scorching. Gentle browning builds deeper, savoury flavour before the stock is added.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, clove, celery, ham, butter, 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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