Skip to main content
Main

Turnip Soup

A soup made from boiled turnips, milk, onion, garlic, butter, cloves, peppercorns, ginger, bay leaves, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Turnip Soup

Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the turnips until tender.

  2. Pass the turnips through a sieve.

Make the soup

  1. In a pan, fry the onion rings and garlic in butter until golden.

  2. Add cloves, peppercorns, green ginger, and bay leaves to the pan.

  3. Stir in the turnip puree and season with pepper and salt.

  4. Simmer gently for 30 minutes, then strain and serve.

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. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the body of the soup, giving it bulk, mild sweetness and a smooth texture when sieved.
Milk
Adds richness and creaminess, softening the flavour and giving the soup a smooth body.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds fat, helping flavour spread and the onion and garlic brown.
Onion
Browns in butter to add savoury sweetness and depth of flavour to the base.
Garlic
Mellows and turns golden in butter, adding aroma and savoury depth.
Bay leaves
Release aromatic compounds slowly into the liquid during simmering, adding a herbal background note.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 30 minutes. A gentle simmer lets the spices and aromatics infuse without boiling hard, which can scorch the milk and make the soup catch on the base. Straining afterwards removes the whole spices and aromatics.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, onion, garlic, butter, clove, ginger, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion, garlic, butter, clove, ginger, 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.

More turnip soup recipes

Carrot 7 See all 93 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes