Skip to main content
Main

To Make Brown Turnip Soup

A soup made from turnips, onions, butter, broth, pepper, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Make Brown Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the turnips and onions.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, fry the turnips and onions in butter until browned, adding pepper and salt.

  2. Stew the mixture in broth until the vegetables are tender.

  3. Pulp the mixture through a fine sieve.

  4. Thicken the soup with flour and butter until it reaches a creamy consistency.

  5. Bring the soup to a boil and serve in a tureen.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the body of the soup and, when browned, add a deeper, sweeter flavour.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they brown in the butter.
Butter
Carries the browning in the pot and adds richness to the finished soup.
Broth
Provides the liquid that softens the vegetables and forms the soup base.
Flour
Thickens the soup to a creamy consistency.

The step that matters

Browning the turnips and onions in butter. Browning relies on the Maillard reaction between sugars and amino acids, which needs enough surface heat and dry contact. Crowding the pot or stopping too early makes the soup taste flat instead of deeply savoury and sweet.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, butter, pepper, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, pepper, flour. 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.

You might also like

Turnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes