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Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with bacon or ham, carrots, turnips, onion, celery, mace, peppercorns, broth, rice, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

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 ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the bacon or ham in a stewpan.

  2. Add the sliced carrots, turnips, onion, and celery on top.

  3. Add the mace and peppercorns.

  4. Cover the pan and stew until the meat releases its juices and the vegetables are tender.

Make the soup

  1. Pour in the broth and add the rice.

  2. Stew all together for 4 hours.

  3. Strain the soup through a sieve.

  4. Before serving, stir in the cream without boiling.

  5. Optionally, add vermicelli.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Bacon or ham
Releases fat and meat juices that flavour the broth as it stews.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body as they soften during the long stew.
Onion
Builds savoury depth as it softens and browns slightly in the pan.
Rice
Thickens the soup as its starch releases during long simmering.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture when stirred in off the heat.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream without boiling. Cream can curdle or separate when it boils, so it should be stirred in just before serving over gentle heat.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, rice, cream. 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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