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A Summer Soup

A hearty soup made with beef, ham bones, carrots, turnips, onions, tomato sauce, peas, and corn.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

A Summer Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Cook the beef and bones in the water until reduced to 2 quarts of liquid.

  2. Strain the broth, cool it, and skim off the fat.

  3. Return the skimmed broth to the heat and bring it to a near boil.

Add the vegetables and finish

  1. Parboil the diced carrots, turnips, and trimmed onions in boiling water for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the parboiled vegetables, peas, and corn to the broth.

  3. Simmer for 30 minutes, then stir in the tomato sauce and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  4. 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.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Beef
Provides the main meat flavour and body as it cooks down into the broth.
Ham or salt-pork bones
Add savory, smoky depth to the broth during long simmering.
Carrots
Add sweetness and firm texture that holds up to simmering.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and a firm, tender bite to the soup.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and color, rounding out the broth's flavour.

The step that matters

Skim the fat after straining and cooling the broth. Fat that is not removed while the broth is cool stays greasy and can make the soup taste heavy. Cooling lets the fat rise and solidify so it lifts off cleanly.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, ham, carrot, turnip, onion, tomato, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, ham, carrot, turnip, onion, tomato, sauce. 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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