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Convent Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with potatoes, onions, carrots, turnips, cabbage, tomatoes, green peas, string beans, and herbs, thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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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 ↓

Convent Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Parboil the turnips, carrots, and sliced potatoes.

  2. Cool the parboiled vegetables.

  3. Add the chopped cabbage to the cooled vegetables.

  4. Slice the onions.

Make the soup base

  1. Fry the sliced onions in hot dripping for five minutes.

  2. Stir in the flour and simmer until well colored.

  3. Transfer the frying pan contents to a soup kettle.

  4. Rinse the pan with 2 cups of boiling water and add the rinsing to the soup pot.

  5. When the soup bubbles, add all the vegetables and stir for a few minutes.

  6. Add another pint of hot water, cover, and simmer until heated through and boiling.

  7. Add the remaining water and cook slowly for two hours or until all vegetables are soft.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain and pulp the vegetables through a colander.

  2. Season the puree with salt, pepper, and chopped sweet herbs.

  3. Stir in the floured butter.

  4. Simmer for five minutes, stirring well before serving.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  3. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Break down during simmering to thicken the soup into a smooth puree.
Flour
Browned with the onions and thickens the soup base.
Dripping
Fat that fries the onions and carries their flavor into the soup.
Butter
Floured butter stirred in at the end to enrich and further thicken the soup.
Onions
Fried until colored to add sweetness and savory depth to the base.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and moisture, softening into the puree.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and simmer until well colored. Flour cooked in fat must brown gently; undercooked flour leaves a raw, pasty taste, while over-browning gives bitterness and a dark color.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, onion, carrot, turnip, beans, cabbage, tomato):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, onion, carrot, turnip, beans, cabbage, tomato. 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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