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Cottage Soup

A hearty beef and vegetable soup with potatoes, cabbage, carrots, turnips, onions, and rice, seasoned with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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 ↓

Cottage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Fry the beef, cabbage, and onions in butter or dripping until browned.

  2. Add 1 gallon of water and bring to a gentle simmer.

Simmer and finish

  1. Stir in the carrots and cook for 3 hours.

  2. Add the turnips and rice towards the end of cooking until tender.

  3. Mash the potatoes and pass them through a colander.

  4. Season the soup with pepper and coarse sea salt, keeping it covered.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  4. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

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

Beef
Provides meaty flavour and substance as it browns and slowly softens in the broth.
Potatoes
Mashed and strained into the soup, their starch thickens the broth and gives it body.
Rice
Absorbs liquid and softens during the long simmer, adding bulk and thickening the soup.
Bacon
Adds fat and smoky, savoury flavour to the soup.
Onions
Browning in fat builds sweet, savoury depth that carries through the broth.

The step that matters

Frying the beef, cabbage, and onions until browned. Browning creates deep savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale, steamed vegetables leave the soup tasting flat, so the pan needs enough room and heat for real colour.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato, rice, carrot, turnip, onion, butter. 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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