Name: Tomato Soup
Ingredients: 1 shin of veal or soup stock; 2 onions, chopped; 2 carrots, chopped; 2 turnips, chopped; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; 12 tomatoes; bread, for toasting

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 ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

Boil the shin of veal for three hours or use soup stock.
Add the chopped onions, carrots, turnips, pepper, salt, and tomatoes.
Boil for two hours and then strain through a sieve.

Serve

Toast the bread until light brown and cut into dice.
Place the toasted bread in a tureen and pour the soup over it 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,555 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,606 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes: Provide the main flavour and body of the soup as they break down during boiling.
Onions: Add savoury sweetness and aroma as they soften and release flavour into the stock.
Carrots: Add natural sweetness and body to the soup.
Turnips: Add mild earthy flavour and body to the soup.
Veal shin: Enriches the stock with savoury depth and body as it simmers for hours.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, carrot, turnip, pepper, tomato, bread):

Capsicumfits better
Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, carrot, turnip, pepper, tomato, bread. 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.