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Another Winter Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of onions, potatoes, turnips, celery, carrots, and anchovy or herring simmered in butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Another Winter Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry the onions, potatoes, and turnips in butter or dripping until softened.

  2. Add the toasted bread, celery, herbs, pepper, and salt to 5 pints of water.

  3. Combine the fried vegetables with the water mixture and stew gently for 4 hours.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain the soup through a sieve.

  2. Add the carrot, celery, chopped parsley, anchovy or herring, and cayenne.

  3. Boil until the vegetables are tender.

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. Celery + carrottop 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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Potato + carrottop 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

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, building the soup's base flavour.
Potatoes
Break down during stewing to thicken the soup and give it body.
Turnips
Add earthy flavour and, as they soften, help thicken the soup.
Butter or dripping
Fat that carries flavour and helps the vegetables soften and brown lightly when fried.
Toasted bread
Hard toasted crust adds roasted aroma and helps thicken the broth.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 4 hours. A gentle simmer lets the vegetables break down slowly and release their starch and flavour. A hard boil can scorch the bottom of the pot and make the soup taste bitter or burnt.

Swap the onion

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

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

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