Skip to main content
Main

Vegetable Soup, Winter

A hearty winter vegetable soup with onions, butter, mixed vegetables, split peas, herbs, and optional tomatoes and oatmeal.

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

Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup, Winter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry the onion in butter until lightly browned.

  2. Add mixed vegetables and stir briskly for 10 minutes.

  3. Incorporate soaked split peas, sweet herbs, clove, salt, cayenne, and stock.

  4. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. If desired, stew tomatoes with the soup.

  2. Mix oatmeal with the pulp and stir into boiling stock, cooking for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the soup and serve with toasted bread.

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 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

Butter
Browns the onion and adds richness and a rounded flavour to the soup.
Split peas
Break down during the long simmer to thicken the soup and add body.
Mixed vegetables
Build the main flavour and, as they soften, add body and sweetness to the stock.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavours and cooks the peas and vegetables.
Oatmeal
Added near the end to thicken the soup further, giving it a fuller texture.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 2 hours. A gentle simmer lets the split peas and vegetables soften fully and release starch without the soup scorching on the base or turning cloudy from a hard boil.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, carrot, turnip, leek, celery, clove. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes