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Soup

Winter Vegetable Soups

A soup of diced carrots, turnips, celery, and button onions simmered with water, salt, sugar, and optional rice, peas, lentils, or suet dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Winter Vegetable Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a pot, combine diced carrots, turnips, celery, and button onions.

  2. Add enough water to cover the vegetables and stir in salt and sugar.

Cook the soup

  1. Half boil the vegetables until tender.

  2. Add rice, dried peas, or lentils to the pot and simmer until thickened.

  3. If using, prepare small suet dumplings and add them to the soup just before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Rice, dried peas, or lentils
Starch from the grain or legume thickens the broth as it simmers.
Turnips
Bulk and mild sweetness that soften into the broth during simmering.

The step that matters

Half boil the vegetables until tender. Cooking the vegetables fully in the water softens their cell walls so they release flavor and become tender. Stopping too early leaves them firm and the soup underdeveloped.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, sugar, rice. 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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