Name: Common Vegetable Soup
Ingredients: 3 potatoes; 3 turnips; 3 parsnips; 3 carrots; ½ cup green peas; ¼ teaspoon salt; weak stock (optional)

Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Common Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Peel and chop the potatoes, turnips, parsnips, and carrots.

Cook

Boil the vegetables in 1 gallon of water until reduced to nearly half.
Add the green peas and cook for a few more minutes.
Season with salt and add weak stock if desired.

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.

Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together590 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,097 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,107 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Potato + parsniptop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together353 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: Starchy body that softens during boiling and thickens the soup slightly.
Carrots: Add natural sweetness and color as they cook down in the broth.
Green peas: Add a bright, sweet flavor and tender texture after the vegetables have softened.