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Carrot Soup

A soup made from carrots, turnip, onion, stock, butter, flour, and seasoning, finished with sugar.

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 turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Carrot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash and scrape the carrots and pare the turnip.

  2. Cut the carrots, turnip, and onion into thin slices.

Cook the soup

  1. Combine the cut vegetables with the stock in a pot and bring to a boil.

  2. Simmer for 2.5 to 3 hours until the carrots are tender.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix the flour and butter on a plate until smooth.

  2. Reboil the soup and add the flour and butter mixture, along with seasoning if needed.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the castor sugar.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the main body of flavour and sweetness as they soften during simmering.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter and stirred into the hot liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and works with flour to form a smooth thickening paste.
Turnip
Adds earthy flavour and body to the simmered vegetable base.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and butter mixture. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid, so the soup must be reboiling as the smooth flour and butter paste goes in. Adding it to a cold or unsmooth mixture can leave lumps.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, butter, flour, pepper, 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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