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Soup

Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with onions, potatoes, carrots, turnips, celery, butter, and catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Peel, slice, and fry the vegetables in ½ pound of butter.

  2. Pour 2 quarts of boiling water over the fried vegetables.

  3. Let them stew slowly for 4 hours.

  4. Strain the mixture through a coarse cloth or sieve.

Finish

  1. Put the strained soup back into the stewpan with the head of celery.

  2. Stew until the celery is tender.

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.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Build the flavour base and add sweetness as they soften in butter.
Potatoes
Break down during stewing to thicken the soup body.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour to the soup as they stew.
Butter
Frying the vegetables in fat carries flavour and adds richness.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables in butter. Frying in butter before adding liquid browns and concentrates the vegetables' sugars, building a deeper flavour. Over-browning can make the soup taste bitter, so the vegetables should soften gently.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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