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A Good Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with salsify, turnip, carrot, cabbage, potatoes, celery, tomatoes, onion, peas, lima beans, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 ↓

A Good Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Combine carrot, salsify, turnip, and cabbage in a pot.

  2. Cover with salted boiling water.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Add beans and peas.

  5. Cook slowly for 30 minutes.

  6. Drain the vegetables and set aside.

Make the soup

  1. Fry onion in butter until light brown.

  2. Stir in the other vegetables.

  3. Cover with cold water or soup stock.

  4. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

  5. After 1 hour, add parsley, celery, pepper, and salt to taste.

  6. Rub butter into brown flour.

  7. Stir the mixture into the soup.

  8. Cook, stirring, until smooth and thick.

  9. Serve.

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 + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 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

Butter
Fat that fries the onion and enriches the soup's flavour.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it a smooth, thick body.
Potatoes
Starchy vegetable that adds body and substance to the soup.
Lima beans
Starchy legumes that add body and a mild, earthy flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour and butter into the soup. Adding flour directly to hot liquid causes lumps. Rubbing it into butter first coats the flour particles so they disperse evenly, and stirring as it cooks lets the starch swell into a smooth, thick soup.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, cabbage, potato, celery, tomato, onion):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, cabbage, potato, celery, tomato, onion. 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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