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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
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Illustration of Turnip SoupIllustration

Why it works: Turnip and garlic work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 664 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

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.

The picture is an illustration, not a photo of this recipe · 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Turnip + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together664 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together29,030 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Milk + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together81,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Clove + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together13,144 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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.

Flavor stand-ins for the garlic

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

  1. Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
  2. Cardamombetter flavor fit
  3. Allspicebetter flavor fit
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, milk, onion, butter, clove, ginger, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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