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Family Soup

A soup made with liquor from meat or poultry, mixed vegetables, herbs, bay leaf, parsley, and thickened with tapioca, sago, or rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 by half.

  2. Add a good teacupful of mixed vegetables and herbs.

  3. Boil until everything can be sieved or mashed.

  4. Return to the pan and thicken with crushed tapioca, sago, or rice flour mixed with water.

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
Break down when boiled to give the soup body and a naturally thick, mashed texture.
Crushed french tapioca or sago
Starch that swells when heated, thickening the soup into a smooth, lightly body-rich consistency.
Ground rice or rice flour
Starch that thickens the liquid as it heats, adding body to the soup.
Liquor from meat or poultry
Flavour base; reducing it concentrates the savoury taste before the soup is thickened.

The step that matters

Thicken with starch after reducing. Starch needs to be mixed with water first and then heated in the soup, so it disperses evenly. Added dry or unmixed, it clumps and leaves lumps that cannot be smoothed out.

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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