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Soup

Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with bones, carrots, turnip, onions or leek, celery, potatoes, toasted bread, salt, pepper, and cold water.

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. Prepare the bones as you would for milk soup.

  2. Wash and prepare the potatoes, carrots, turnip, and celery.

  3. Peel and slice the onions.

  4. Cut the other vegetables into small, neat strips.

Cook

  1. Put all the vegetables and the toast into a saucepan with the liquid from the bones.

  2. Boil slowly for 1.5 hours.

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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Break down during long simmering to thicken the broth and add body.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and color to the broth as they soften.
Onions
Contribute savory depth and aroma as they cook down into the broth.
Toasted bread
Adds toasty flavor and helps thicken the soup as it softens.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 1.5 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavor from the bones and vegetables while keeping the broth clear. A hard, rapid boil can cloud the liquid and break the vegetables apart unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, potato, bread, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, potato, bread, 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.

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