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Soups and Broths

A vegetable broth made with celery, onion, carrots, turnip, parsnip, herbs, sheep's melts, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soups and Broths

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine all ingredients in a pot.

  2. Cover and simmer slowly for 7-8 hours.

Finish and store

  1. Season with salt to taste.

  2. Strain through a sieve when reduced to a good consomme.

  3. Store for future use.

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 + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Celery + carrottop 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 + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's melts
Provide the main meat flavour and body for the broth as they simmer.
Carrots
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the long-simmered broth.
Onion
Contributes savoury, sweet aroma that builds the base flavour of the stock.
Celery
Adds a fresh, savoury aroma that supports the broth's overall flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly for 7-8 hours. A gentle simmer keeps the broth clear and lets collagen and flavour extract slowly. A rolling boil would cloud the liquid and emulsify fat into it, so the consomme would turn out murky and greasy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, clove, carrot, turnip, parsnip, sugar):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, clove, carrot, turnip, parsnip, sugar. 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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