Name: Soup Without Meat
Ingredients: 1 quart water; 3 potatoes; 3 onions; 3 turnips; 2 carrots; 1 tablespoon rice or barley; salt to taste; parsley, chopped fine

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Soup Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Add water to a pot and bring to a boil.
Peel and chop the potatoes, onions, turnips, and carrots, then add them to the boiling water.
Stir in the rice or barley and season with salt.
Boil until the mixture reduces to 1 pint.
Add chopped parsley about 10 minutes 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.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,842 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

Potatoes: Break down partly during simmering to add body and thicken the broth.
Rice or barley: Releases starch as it cooks, giving the broth more body.
Carrots: Add natural sweetness as they soften in the simmering liquid.

Swap the onion

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

Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Okrafits better
Onionthe original

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