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Stock for Vegetable Soups

A vegetable stock made by simmering beans, peas, carrot, onion, celery, herbs, garlic, mace, pepper, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

Stock for Vegetable Soups

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil all the vegetables and seasonings in 2 quarts of water for 3 to 4 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Use this stock as a base for various soups and sauces.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Add body and a mild, earthy flavour to the stock as they break down.
Split peas
Thicken the stock slightly and add body as they cook down.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and a gentle aromatic base to the stock.
Onion
Provides savoury depth and aroma as it simmers in the water.
Celery
Contributes a fresh, savoury aroma to the stock.

The step that matters

Boiling for 3 to 4 hours. A long, gentle simmer extracts flavour from the vegetables and legumes. Letting the liquid boil hard for too long can cloud the stock and concentrate it unevenly, so keep it at a steady simmer and watch the water level.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, peas, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, peas, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove. 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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