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Common Vegetable Soup

A simple soup of diced potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, green peas, and salt, boiled in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Common Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the potatoes, turnips, parsnips, and carrots in the water until reduced to half the quantity.

  2. Add the green peas and salt.

  3. If desired, add weak stock to enhance flavor.

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. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Potato + parsniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together353 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
Their starch leaches into the liquid and softens, lightly thickening the broth and giving it body.
Carrots
As they simmer they release natural sugars and color, adding gentle sweetness to the broth.
Parsnips
As they cook they release sweet, nutty flavor into the broth.
Green peas
They add bright color and tender, fresh sweetness, and cook quickly.

The step that matters

Boil the root vegetables until reduced by half. The vegetables must become fully tender so their starch and flavor release into the water. Boiling too hard or too long breaks them down into mush and concentrates the broth unevenly.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

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