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Good Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with onions, turnip, carrots, potatoes, butter, parsley, sago, water, milk, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Good Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare all the vegetables by peeling and cutting them into small thick pieces.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter.

  3. Add the sugar, salt, pepper, parsley, and vegetables.

  4. Cook over medium heat for 10 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally.

Make the soup

  1. Add the water and let the soup simmer for 1 hour or until the vegetables are tender, stirring often to prevent burning.

  2. Strain the soup through a wire sieve or colander into a basin.

  3. Rub the vegetables through with a wooden spoon.

  4. Pour the soup back into the saucepan.

  5. Add the milk.

  6. Sprinkle in the sago.

  7. Gently boil the soup for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with toasted bread or squares of bread fried in dripping.

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

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

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 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 when rubbed through, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Sago
Swells during boiling, further thickening the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor as the vegetables cook.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the flavor of the soup.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body as they soften and are puréed.

The step that matters

Rubbing the vegetables through the sieve. Pressing cooked vegetables through a sieve breaks their cell walls into a smooth purée, which thickens the soup. Skipping or rushing this leaves the soup lumpy and thin.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, potato, butter, parsley, milk, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, potato, butter, parsley, milk, sugar. 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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