Skip to main content
Main

Soup

A hearty soup made with beef, carrots, parsnips, turnips, cabbage, onion, parsley, thyme, allspice, cloves, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the base

  1. Heat lard in a pot and sprinkle flour.

  2. Add carrots, parsnips, turnips, cabbage, parsley, thyme, onion, beef, allspice, and cloves.

  3. Brown the beef, then add boiling water to achieve desired soup strength.

Strain

  1. Strain the soup through a sieve, using the water from the Bouillon for best flavor.

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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Parsnip + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together270 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Lard
Fat that carries heat and flavor, and helps the beef and vegetables brown.
Flour
Sprinkled into the hot fat, it helps lightly thicken the soup.
Beef
Provides the main savory, meaty flavor and body of the soup.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it cooks, building aroma in the base.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and colour to the soup.
Cabbage
Adds bulk and a mild, slightly sweet vegetable flavor as it cooks.

The step that matters

Brown the beef. Browning creates deep savory flavor through Maillard reactions. Beef crowded in the pot or not given enough heat will steam instead, leaving the soup flat-tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, carrot, parsnip, turnip, cabbage, parsley, thyme):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, carrot, parsnip, turnip, cabbage, parsley, thyme. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes