Skip to main content
Main

Winter Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with carrots, turnips, celery, onions, and optional grains or dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and lentils match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pot, combine diced carrots, turnips, celery, and button onions.

  2. Add enough water to cover the vegetables and half boil them with salt and sugar.

  3. Add the vegetables to the broth and cook until tender.

  4. For a thicker soup, pulp in rice, dried peas, or lentils.

  5. If desired, prepare small suet dumplings and boil them in broth or water, then add them to the soup just before serving.

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 + lentilstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + lentilstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 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

Carrots
Adds sweetness and body as they soften during cooking.
Turnips
Contribute a mild, slightly peppery flavor and tender texture when cooked.
Button onions
Add savory depth and sweetness as they soften and release their flavor into the broth.
Broth
Provides the main liquid and savory base of the soup.

The step that matters

Half boiling the vegetables with salt and sugar. Boiling the vegetables in water first softens them and seasons them from within. Adding sugar helps balance the flavors, and salt draws out flavor, so the vegetables taste well-seasoned once combined with the broth.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, onion, sugar, rice, lentils):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, onion, sugar, rice, lentils. 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

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipes