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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of onions, turnips, carrots, and herbs simmered in water, thickened with flour or oatmeal, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Fry the shredded onions in 1½ ounces of butter or sweet dripping until browned.

  2. Add the onions to a saucepan with 3 pints of water.

  3. Add the sliced turnips, carrots, dried herbs, salt, and pepper.

  4. Boil gently for 3 hours without a lid.

Thicken the soup

  1. Thicken the soup with 1 tablespoon of flour or oatmeal and boil for an additional 10 minutes.

Prepare the roll

  1. Tear a new roll in half and remove the crumb in small pieces.

  2. Crisp them in the oven.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 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. Onion + carrottop 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

Onions
Browning in fat builds a sweet, savoury base for the broth.
Turnip
Adds body and a mild, slightly sweet flavour as it simmers.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and colour to the broth.
Flour or oatmeal
Starch thickens the simmering liquid into a fuller soup.

The step that matters

Thickening the soup. Starch from flour or oatmeal swells as it heats, so it must be stirred in evenly and kept simmering to cook out the raw floury taste and avoid lumps.

Swap the onion

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

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

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