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Soup Sante

A vegetable soup made with turnips, carrots, onions, cabbage lettuce, asparagus peas, stock, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soup Sante

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the shredded turnips, carrots, small onions, Spanish onion, cabbage lettuce, and asparagus peas in a soup pot.

  2. Add 1 pint of stock and bring to a boil until the stock is reduced but not caught.

  3. Fill the pot with more stock, add the sugar, and season with salt if desired.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together313 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 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

Turnips
Provide the main body and mild, earthy flavour of the soup.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the soup.
Onions
Build savoury depth as the base flavour of the soup.
Asparagus peas
Add tender texture and a fresh, sweet note.

The step that matters

Reducing the stock without scorching. Bringing the stock to a boil over direct heat can cause it to stick and burn on the bottom of the pot, giving a bitter, scorched taste. Stirring and watching the heat keeps the stock reducing evenly and the flavour clean.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, cabbage, lettuce, asparagus, peas, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, cabbage, lettuce, asparagus, peas, sugar. 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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