Skip to main content
Main

Common Turnip Soup

A soup made by stewing turnips in butter and adding broth, then simmering and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,252 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Common Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Wash, wipe and peel the turnips, then weigh them.

  2. Cut the turnips into slices about ¼ inch thick.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a clean saucepan over low heat.

  2. Add the turnips to the melted butter and stew them gently for 45 minutes without browning.

  3. Prepare the soup and pour it over the turnips.

  4. Let the mixture simmer for another 45 minutes.

  5. Pass the mixture through a coarse sieve or soup strainer.

  6. Return the soup to the heat and stir until it boils for 3 to 4 minutes.

  7. Skim off any scum.

  8. Add salt and pepper if needed.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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 + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Turnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the body of the soup, becoming soft and tender as they stew and simmer.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and gently cooks the turnips without browning them.

The step that matters

Stewing the turnips without browning. Over low heat the butter should only warm and soften the turnip slices. If the heat is too high, the milk solids and sugars in the butter and turnips brown, changing the flavour and colour of the soup.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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.

More turnip soup recipes

Carrot 7 See all 93 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes