Skip to main content
Main

Hotch-Potch

A boiled vegetable stew of carrots, turnips, peas, onion, butter, pepper, salt, and lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hotch-Potch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil grated carrots, turnips, green peas, and sliced onion in enough water to cover them until tender.

  2. Rub the mixture through a coarse sieve and return the pulp to the pan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt to the pulp.

  2. Mix in the boiled young peas, sliced carrot, turnip, and lettuce.

  3. Serve in a deep vegetable dish or tureen.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Carrots
Provide sweetness, body and bright colour to the purée.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body to the vegetable base.
Green peas
Add sweetness, colour and a soft, thick texture when pulped.
Butter
Adds richness, a silky mouthfeel and carries flavour.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and depth as it softens in the boiling water.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a coarse sieve. Pushing the cooked vegetables through the sieve breaks down their cell walls into a smooth pulp. If they are not fully tender, the pulp stays grainy and the texture is uneven.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, onion, butter, pepper, lettuce. 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 hotch-potch recipes

Winter 5Scotch 4Soup 3 See all 15 →

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipes