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Soup

Herb Soup

A vegetable soup made with cabbage, carrot, parsnip, turnip, parsley, leeks, endive, thyme, celery, butter, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Herb Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and chop the cabbage, endive, parsley, and thyme very small.

  2. Clean the carrot, parsnip, turnip, leeks, and celery; peel, remove any bad parts, and grate or chop finely.

Cook the vegetables

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and add the chopped vegetables, cooking slowly with the lid on. Shake the pan frequently to prevent burning.

Stew

  1. Once the vegetables are tender, pour the boiling water over them, add seasoning, and stew for 1 hour.

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 + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 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

Butter
Melts to coat the vegetables, carrying flavour and helping them soften gently without browning.
Cabbage
Provides the bulk of the soup and adds body as it softens and releases its flavour into the broth.
Leeks
Add a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma as they soften in the butter.
Parsnip
Its natural sugars add sweetness and body to the soup as it stews.

The step that matters

Cooking the vegetables slowly with the lid on. Cooking gently in fat with a lid traps moisture so the vegetables soften without scorching. Frequent shaking helps prevent sticking and burning on the pan base.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, parsnip, turnip, parsley, leek, endive, thyme):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, parsnip, turnip, parsley, leek, endive, 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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