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Carrot Soup

A hearty soup made with broth, beef bones, carrots, onions, and turnip, seasoned with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Carrot Soup

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Carrot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine the broth, beef bones, onions, turnip, salt, and pepper in a large pot.

  2. Simmer for 3 hours.

Prepare and cook the carrots

  1. Scrape the carrots.

  2. Thinly slice the carrots.

  3. Strain the soup over the carrots.

  4. Cook until the carrots are soft enough to puree.

Finish the soup

  1. Blend the carrot pulp with the soup until it reaches a pea‑soup consistency.

  2. Add cayenne pepper to taste.

  3. Prepare the soup a day in advance for best 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.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness, and colour, and thicken the soup when pureed.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth.
Turnip
Adds a mild, slightly sharp earthy flavour to the broth.
Beef bones
Release gelatin and savoury flavour into the broth during long simmering.

The step that matters

Blend the carrot pulp with the soup. Carrots must be fully soft before blending; undercooked carrots stay grainy and will not reach a smooth, pea-soup consistency. Blending while hot also helps the starch in the carrots release and thicken the liquid evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, beef, carrot, turnip, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, beef, carrot, turnip, 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.

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