Name: Vegetable Soup with Stock
Ingredients: 3 onions, chopped; 3 turnips, chopped; 1 carrot, chopped; 4 potatoes, chopped; 2 tablespoons butter; 1 teaspoon powdered sugar; 2 quarts stock

Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Vegetable Soup with Stock

Ingredients

Directions

In a stew pan, combine the chopped onions, turnips, carrot, and potatoes with the butter and powdered sugar.
Cook for 10 minutes over medium heat.
Add the stock and bring to a boil.
Reduce heat and simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 30 minutes.

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.

Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,107 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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

Onions: Add aromatic sweetness and body as they soften into the broth.
Potatoes: Break down slightly as they cook, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Butter: Carries flavor and adds richness as the vegetables are first cooked.
Powdered sugar: Encourages gentle browning and rounds out the sweetness of the vegetables.
Stock: Forms the liquid base that carries flavor and cooks the vegetables.

Swap the onion

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

Leekfits better
Parsnipfits better
Beetrootfits better
Onionthe original

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