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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with veal knuckle, onions, turnips, milk, and rice flour.

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

Why it works: Turnip and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 367 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Boil the knuckle of veal in 5 quarts of water for 4 hours, covered.

  2. Skim off the fat from the stock and bring it to a boil.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the chopped onion and diced turnips, and simmer for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the soup and return it to the pot.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the milk with the rice flour, then stir into the soup.

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

  5. Bring to a boil while stirring constantly to prevent scorching, then remove from heat.

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. Turnip + marjoramtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together367 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal knuckle
Releases gelatin and flavour into the stock, giving the soup its body and savoury depth.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and tender body as they soften during the simmer.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a mellow, rounded richness to the broth.
Rice flour
Thickens the milk-enriched broth, giving it a smoother, slightly fuller texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silkier mouthfeel in the finished soup.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil while stirring constantly. Once milk and starch are in the soup, they can settle and scorch on the bottom of the pot. Constant stirring keeps the starch dispersed and the milk from sticking, so the soup thickens smoothly.

Swap the marjoram

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, onion, turnip, milk, rice, flour, butter):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Marjoramthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, onion, turnip, milk, rice, flour, butter. 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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