Skip to main content
Main

Good Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of onions, turnip, carrots, potatoes, butter, milk, sago, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Good Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the vegetables and cut them into small squares.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the vegetables and sugar, and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  2. Add the boiling water and simmer for about 1 hour, or until the vegetables are tender, stirring often to prevent burning.

  3. Strain the soup through a wire sieve or colander into a basin, rubbing the vegetables through with a wooden spoon.

  4. Pour the strained soup back into the saucepan, add the milk and sago, stir, and simmer for 30 minutes.

  5. Add the chopped parsley and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with squares of bread fried in dripping or toasted.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Break down when simmered and rubbed through, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Sago
Starch that swells as it cooks, thickening the milk-enriched soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softness to the strained soup.
Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables at the start and adds richness.
Onions
Form the aromatic base that gives the soup its savoury flavour.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour, and body once rubbed through the sieve.

The step that matters

Stirring while the soup simmers. Starchy vegetables and sugar can scorch on the bottom of the pan during the long simmer. Stirring often prevents burning and keeps the flavour clean.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, potato, butter, parsley, milk, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, potato, butter, parsley, milk, 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.

More vegetable soup recipes

Spring 46Beef 45Winter 31French 11Lentil 9Clear 8 See all 425 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes