Name: Soups
Ingredients: beef; celery; parsley; onions; carrots; asparagus; potatoes; egg yolks; flour

Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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 ↓

Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Boil meat in a covered kettle to extract juices.
Skim the soup when it begins to boil.
Do not add salt until the soup is strained.
After straining, remove all fat and save it for later use.
Add root vegetables like celery, parsley, onions, carrots, asparagus, and potatoes to the stock.
Thicken bouillon with beaten egg yolks mixed with cold water.
For beef or tomato soup, thicken with flour by heating drippings, stirring in flour, and adding soup gradually to avoid lumps.

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.

Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Asparagus + potatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together217 recipes

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

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, celery, parsley, carrot, asparagus, potato, egg):

Leekfits better
Chivefits better
Parsnipfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, celery, parsley, carrot, asparagus, potato, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.