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Winter Vegetable Soup

A soup made with turnip, carrot, onion, celery, leeks, parsley, garlic clove, butter, and boiling water, simmered for an hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the turnip and carrot.

  2. Peel the onion and fry all three vegetables in butter until light yellow.

  3. Add the chopped celery and leeks, stir, and fry for 5 minutes.

Simmer and serve

  1. Add minced parsley, clove, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  2. Cover with boiling water and simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Remove the scum, strain, 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 + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and carries flavor during the initial frying.
Leeks
Add a mild onion-like sweetness and body to the soup base.
Celery
Contributes savory aroma and a fresh, herbal background flavor.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and body as it softens during simmering.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables until light yellow. Frying in butter should stay gentle so the vegetables soften and turn lightly golden without browning. Over-browning adds bitter, scorched flavors that carry into the whole soup and make its color darker than intended.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, onion, butter, celery, leek, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, onion, butter, celery, leek, parsley. 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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