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Winter Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, celery, and sweet herbs simmered in butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, celery, and sweet herbs; fry until browned.

  3. Pour in the water and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat; simmer until the soup is reduced to 3 quarts.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with fried 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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 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

Butter
Fat that browns the vegetables and carries their aroma into the soup.
Turnips
Firm root vegetable that adds body and a mildly sweet, earthy flavour.
Potatoes
Starch that thickens the broth and softens into the soup as it simmers.
Onions
Aromatic base that adds savoury depth as they brown in the butter.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables until browned. Browning builds deep flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation of the sugars. Pale, steamed vegetables give a flatter soup, so they need enough time and heat in the butter before the water goes in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, potato, celery, butter, pepper, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, potato, celery, butter, pepper, bread. 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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