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Parsnip Soup

A soup of parsnips, onion, celery, stock, milk, butter, and lemon, finished with flour and croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Parsnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Slice the vegetables.

  2. Fry the sliced vegetables in butter over low heat for about 15 minutes, without browning.

  3. Add the stock and simmer until the parsnips are tender, about 40 minutes.

  4. Rub the mixture through a wire sieve back into the pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the milk, salt, and pepper, and bring to a boil.

  2. Mix the flour with a little milk or water, pour it into the soup, stir, and cook for 5 to 6 minutes.

  3. Add the lemon juice and serve with croutons of fried or toasted 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Parsnip + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together561 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Parsnips
Give the soup its main body and sweet, earthy flavour once simmered and sieved.
Butter
Fat for frying the vegetables gently, adding richness and carrying flavour.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly so it has a smoother, more body-filled texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the creamy milk and sweet vegetables.

The step that matters

Fry without browning. Frying the vegetables over low heat softens them and draws out sweetness. If they brown, the flavour turns bitter and roasted, which changes the soup's clean, delicate taste.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, parsnip, celery, butter, lemon, flour, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, parsnip, celery, butter, lemon, flour, pepper. 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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