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Tomato Soup

A stew of turnips, carrots, onions, celery, tomatoes, and stock, seasoned with pepper and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

  1. Stew turnips, carrots, onions, and celery slowly.

  2. Add 4 quarts of diluted stock and 8 to 10 ripe tomatoes.

  3. Cook for 1.5 hours.

  4. Pass the mixture through a sieve back into the pan.

  5. Add pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

  6. Boil for 10 minutes and serve hot.

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 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

Tomatoes
Provide the main flavour, acidity and body of the soup.
Turnips
Add starchy body and mild sweetness as they soften during stewing.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body as they soften during stewing.
Onions
Build savoury aroma and sweetness as they stew slowly.

The step that matters

Pass the mixture through a sieve. Straining after long cooking removes the fibrous pulp and skins of the vegetables and tomatoes, giving the soup a smooth texture. Pressing the solids through captures the body that a sieve retains.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, celery, tomato, 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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