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Belgian Turnip Soup

A soup of diced turnips, onions, butter, flour, and milk, simmered with sugar and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Belgian Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, melt the butter over medium heat and add the chopped onions until they are soft.

  2. Add the diced turnips, brown sugar, black pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Pour in the water and simmer for 20 minutes.

  4. Stir in the flour and milk, then boil for an additional 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with diced fried bread.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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 and give it its main vegetable flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour from the onions into the soup.
Onions
Soften into the base and add savoury sweetness.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the milk.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body to the soup.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and milk, then boil. Flour thickens liquid only when it is fully dispersed and heated. Stirring it in evenly before boiling prevents lumps, and boiling for the full time cooks out the raw flour taste and sets the body of the soup. Milk can scorch on the base of the pot, so keep stirring.

Swap the onion

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

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

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