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Winter Soup

A hearty soup of diced carrots, turnips, celery, and onions simmered in salted water, optionally thickened with 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: Turnip and lentils match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

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

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

  3. Boil the vegetables until tender, then add them to the broth.

Add the optional extras

  1. If desired, add rice, dried peas, or lentils to thicken the soup.

  2. For dumplings, mix suet with flour and form small balls, no larger than an egg.

  3. Boil the dumplings in broth or water 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. Turnip + lentilstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + lentilstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Add sweetness and body as they soften during the long simmer.
Turnips
Contribute a mild, slightly peppery flavor and soft texture when cooked.
Celery heart
Adds savory aroma and a subtle vegetal backbone to the broth.
Button onions
Add savory depth and sweetness as they cook down in the broth.
Rice, dried peas, or lentils
Starches that thicken the soup as they cook and release their starch.

The step that matters

Boiling the vegetables until tender. Root vegetables need enough time at a steady boil for their starches to soften fully. Stopping early leaves them firm and the broth thin and underflavored.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, onion, sugar, rice, lentils):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

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