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Soup

Family Soup

A vegetable soup made with meat or poultry stock, mixed vegetables, herbs, and thickened with tapioca or rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Family Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the liquor until reduced to half the quantity.

  2. Add mixed vegetables and herbs to the pot.

  3. Boil until everything can be sieved or mashed.

  4. Return the mixture to the pan.

  5. Thicken with crushed tapioca or sago, cooking for 15 minutes, or with rice flour paste, cooking for 10 minutes.

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. Leek + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Leek + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Mixed vegetables
Provide body, sweetness and flavour once boiled down and sieved into the soup.
Crushed french tapioca or sago
Thickens the soup as its starch swells during cooking.
Ground rice or rice flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when cooked in a paste.

The step that matters

Thicken with tapioca, sago or rice flour. Starches only thicken fully when cooked long enough to swell and gelatinise. Undercooked starch leaves the soup thin and gives a raw, chalky taste, so follow the stated cooking time for the chosen thickener.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, celery, leek, turnip, carrot, parsnip, parsley):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, celery, leek, turnip, carrot, parsnip, parsley. 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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