Name: A Simple Soup
Ingredients: 3 quarts good broth; 2 carrots, chopped; 3-4 turnips, chopped; 2 tablespoons butter; Salt, to taste; Gravy, to taste; A few spoonfuls of rice or pearl barley, boiled separately

Why it works: Carrot and turnip are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,001 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

In a stew pan, combine the broth, carrots, turnips, butter, salt, and gravy.
Stew until the vegetables are tender enough to be rubbed through a sieve.
Add the boiled rice or pearl barley to the mixture.
Boil everything together for 15 minutes.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Carrot + turniptop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together8,001 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + ricetop 4% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together2,351 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Turnip + ricetop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together821 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Butter + ricetop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together9,587 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).
Carrot + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together10,061 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots: Provide body, sweetness and colour as they soften and thicken the soup when rubbed through.
Turnips: Add body and a mildly sweet, earthy flavour as they cook down into the soup.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Rice or pearl barley: Adds body and thickness to the soup as it simmers with the vegetables.

Flavor stand-ins for the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, butter, rice):

Potatobetter flavor fit
Tomatobetter flavor fit
Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, butter, rice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.