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Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with onions, carrots, turnips, celery, herbs, and toasted bread, simmered in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. In a stewpan, combine the onions, carrots, and turnips with the butter and powdered sugar.

  2. Cook over high heat for 10 minutes without browning the vegetables.

Simmer and finish

  1. Pour in the stock or boiling water, then add the toasted bread, celery, herbs, salt, and pepper.

  2. Simmer for 3 hours, skimming off any foam.

  3. Strain the soup.

  4. Before serving, add sliced carrot, celery, and turnip, and season with a spoonful of Worcestershire sauce or ketchup.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour while gently softening the vegetables.
Onions
Provide the aromatic base and sweetness as they soften in the butter.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stock.
Turnips
Contribute earthy flavour and body to the broth.
Toasted bread
Adds toasty aroma and helps thicken the soup slightly.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables without browning them. Sweating the vegetables gently in butter with sugar draws out sweetness while keeping flavour clean. High heat that browns them can turn the soup bitter or dark, so keep the pan moving and watch closely.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, butter, bread, celery, parsley, thyme):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, butter, bread, celery, parsley, thyme. 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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