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A Quickly Made Turnip Soup

A quick turnip soup made by stewing turnips in stock, sieving, and seasoning with salt, pepper, sugar, and optional onion or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Quickly Made Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice the turnips.

  2. In a pot, combine the turnips and 3 pints of stock.

Make the soup

  1. Stew gently for 25 to 30 minutes until the turnips can be reduced to pulp.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve into a clean pot.

  3. Add 1 quart of stock, salt, white pepper, and the lump of sugar.

  4. Bring to a boil for 2 to 3 minutes, then skim off any foam.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

  2. Optionally, stew the sliced onion with the turnips for added flavor and stir in cream for improved color.

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 + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Veal + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,841 recipes

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

  4. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Turnip + white peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together275 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 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

Turnips
Form the body of the soup, breaking down into a smooth pulp that thickens it.
Stock
Supplies the liquid base and savory flavor in which the turnips cook and soften.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, lighter color to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stew until the turnips reach pulp. The turnips must be cooked fully soft so they can be pressed through a sieve into a smooth soup. Undercooked pieces will not break down, leaving a grainy texture.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, veal, white pepper, sugar, cream):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, veal, white pepper, sugar, cream. 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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