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Piedmontese Soup

A turnip soup from Piedmont with anchovies, stock, and fried mashed potato balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 164 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Piedmontese Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a skillet.

  2. Add the sliced turnips and sugar and fry until the turnips are slightly browned.

  3. Add the strong stock and let it simmer gently for 45 minutes.

  4. Strain the soup.

  5. Stir in the stewed tomatoes.

Add the anchovy paste

  1. Pound the anchovies with garlic and a little butter into a smooth paste.

  2. Pass the paste through a fine sieve.

  3. Add the paste to the soup.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup into a tureen containing the fried mashed potato balls.

  2. Add tarragon leaves if available.

  3. Serve with grated Parmesan cheese 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.

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 + tarragontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Garlic + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,517 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Tomato + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  5. Clove + tarragontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the body of the soup and, browned in butter, add a sweet, caramelized flavour.
Anchovies
Add a deep, savory saltiness that rounds out the soup without tasting fishy.
Stewed tomatoes
Add acidity and a mellow tomato flavour to balance the rich stock.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and helps brown the turnips.
Mashed potatoes
Fried into small balls, they give crisp contrast to the smooth soup.

The step that matters

Frying the turnips until slightly browned. Browning caramelizes the turnips' natural sugars, building depth of flavour. Heat that is too low only softens them, while excessive heat scorches the butter and sugar, making the soup taste bitter.

Swap the tarragon

The recipe marks tarragon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, butter, sugar, tomato, clove, garlic, potato):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Tarragonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, sugar, tomato, clove, garlic, potato. 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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