Name: A Plain Soup
Ingredients: 2 carrots; 2 onions; 2 turnips; 5 quarts of water; 2 tablespoons of tomato catsup; ½ cup coarse corn-meal; Pepper to taste; Salt to taste; 1 cup boiling milk

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Plain Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Slice the meat and crack the bones.
Cut the vegetables into strips and fry the onions in good dripping.
Put all ingredients, including meat and bones, into a soup pot with the water.
Cover and cook gently for 5 hours.
Strain the liquid from the meat and rub the vegetables through a colander.
Season and set aside half the stock for tomorrow.
Put the stock for today into a soup kettle, season, and boil for 1 minute to skim.
Add the corn-meal, previously scalded with boiling milk, and stir well.
Simmer for half an hour before adding the catsup and pouring into the 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.

Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,555 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,606 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + corntop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,099 recipes

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

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 (carrot, turnip, tomato, corn, pepper, milk):

Capsicumfits better
Parsnipfits better
Potatofits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, tomato, corn, pepper, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.