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Carrot Soup

A simple carrot soup made with carrots, stock, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Carrot Soup

Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Carrot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the puree

  1. Boil the carrots in water until thoroughly cooked, then drain.

  2. Pass the cooked carrots through a fine sieve to obtain a puree.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the carrot puree with enough clear stock to achieve the desired consistency.

  2. Add pepper, salt, and a pinch of sugar to taste.

  3. Melt 1 ounce of butter and mix it with 1 tablespoon of flour.

  4. Gradually add the butter‑flour mixture to the carrot puree and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Add a small piece of butter before serving and garnish with croutons.

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

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Form the main body of the soup, and once pureed, give it its color, sweetness and thick texture.
Butter
Mixed with flour to form a roux that thickens the soup and adds richness.
Flour
Combined with melted butter to form a roux that thickens the puree as it heats.

The step that matters

Adding the butter-flour mixture to the puree. If the roux is dumped in at once or not whisked in gradually, lumps can form and the flour will not disperse evenly. Adding it gradually while stirring and then bringing the soup to a boil lets the starch hydrate and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, sugar, butter, flour):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar, butter, flour. 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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