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Vegetable Soup Without Meat

A hearty vegetable soup made with carrots, celery, sweet potato, turnip, parsnip, white potato, rice, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip 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 ↓

Vegetable Soup Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add all the diced vegetables except the white potato and fry until light brown.

  3. Transfer the vegetables and butter to a soup kettle.

Simmer

  1. Add the cold water, rice, bay leaf, salt, parsley, and celery.

  2. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  3. Add the diced white potato and boil for an additional 15 minutes.

  4. Season to taste and serve.

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. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Sweet potato + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, building a savory base for the broth.
Sweet potato
Breaks down during simmering, adding body and natural sweetness to the soup.
White potato
Adds starch that thickens the broth slightly and gives the soup body.
Rice
Releases starch during simmering, helping to thicken the soup.
Butter
Carries flavor and helps the vegetables brown lightly in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying the diced vegetables until light brown. Browning builds flavor through the Maillard reaction, which adds savory depth to the broth. Stopping too early leaves the soup tasting flat, while over-browning can make it bitter.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, sweet potato, butter, turnip, rice, parsnip):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, sweet potato, butter, turnip, rice, parsnip. 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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