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Tomato Soup

A soup made with onions, turnips, carrots, celery, ham, butter, stock, tomatoes, pepper, salt, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Tomato 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 ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sliced onions, turnips, carrots, celery, diced ham, and butter.

  2. Steam the mixture over gentle heat for 30 minutes.

Simmer

  1. Pour in the stock and add the chopped tomatoes.

  2. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Rub the vegetables through a sieve and return to the pot with the liquid.

  2. Boil for a few minutes, then season with pepper and salt.

  3. Serve hot with toasted bread on the side.

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. Turnip + carrottop 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. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, building the base flavour of the soup.
Tomatoes
Provide acidity, colour and body as they break down into the stock.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour from the vegetables and ham.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body once cooked and pressed through the sieve.
Ham
Adds savoury, meaty flavour to the vegetable base.
Stock
Forms the liquid that extracts flavour and gives the soup its volume.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 2 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavour slowly and lets the vegetables soften fully, while a hard boil can scorch the base and make the soup cloudy.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, turnip, carrot, celery, ham, butter, meat. 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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