Name: Vegetable Soup
Ingredients: 1 quart stock; ½ cup carrot, diced; ½ cup turnip, diced; 1 cup potato, diced; ½ cup celery, diced; Salt to taste; Pepper to taste

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

Prepare

Wash and peel the turnip and potato.
Scrape the carrot and celery.
Cut all vegetables into quarter‑inch dice.

Cook

Cook the diced vegetables in boiling salted water until tender.
Drain the vegetables and add them to the boiling stock.
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.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,418 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Potato: Adds body and starch that thickens the broth slightly as it breaks down.
Carrot: Adds natural sweetness and colour to the soup.
Celery: Adds a fresh, aromatic savoury flavour.
Turnip: Adds a mildly peppery flavour and firm texture.

The step that matters

Cook the diced vegetables until tender before adding them to the stock. Uniform quarter‑inch dice cook at the same rate, so pieces become tender without some turning mushy while others stay hard. Draining them before adding to the stock keeps the broth from being diluted by the cooking water.