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Variety Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with beef stock, carrots, turnip, potatoes, onions, cabbage, and brown beans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Variety Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large pot, bring 2 quarts of beef stock to a boil.

  2. Add the sliced carrot, turnip, potatoes, onions, and chopped cabbage.

  3. Boil the vegetables until tender.

  4. In a separate pot, boil the brown beans with a little soda added to the water.

  5. About 30 minutes before serving, add the cooked beans to the stock and vegetables.

  6. Simmer slowly until ready to serve.

  7. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Carrot + potatotop 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

Brown beans
Add body and substance, and make the soup more filling as they soften in the broth.
Potatoes
Break down slightly as they cook, thickening the broth and adding starch.
Beef stock
Forms the savory liquid base that carries the flavor of the whole soup.
Cabbage
Softens during simmering and adds mild sweetness and texture.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, potato, onion, beans, pepper. 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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