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Good Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with barley, carrots, turnip, potato, tomato, parsley, celery seed, salt, pepper, and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Good Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the barley

  1. Soak the barley for two hours.

  2. Put the soaked barley into a stew pan with the soup stock and simmer gently for one hour.

Prepare and cook the vegetables

  1. Prepare the vegetables by cutting them into fancy shapes or dicing them.

  2. Add the prepared vegetables to the stew pan and cover with boiling water, cooking until tender.

  3. Once the vegetables are tender, add the tomato cut into tiny pieces and all remaining ingredients.

  4. Simmer very slowly for 10 to 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot 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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  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. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Barley
Softens into chewy grains that thicken the soup and add body.
Potato
Its starch softens and helps give the soup a thicker, more substantial body.
Tomato
Adds acidity and moisture, brightening the flavor of the broth.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and color to the soup.

The step that matters

Simmer the barley gently for one hour. Gentle heat lets the barley grains soften evenly and release starch slowly, which thickens the stock. A hard, rolling boil can break the grains apart and make the soup cloudy and mushy.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, potato, barley, parsley, celery, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, potato, barley, parsley, celery, 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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