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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with barley, bone or lean meat, turnip, carrots, potatoes, and optional vegetables, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large pot, combine cold water, pearl barley, shank bone or lean meat, salt, turnip, and carrots.

  2. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to simmer slowly for 2.5 hours.

  3. About 30 minutes before finishing, add the diced potatoes and any optional vegetables.

  4. If the soup reduces too much, add boiling water to replenish.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Barley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Barley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Barley + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pearl barley
Thickens the broth as its starch softens during the long simmer.
Shank bone or lean meat
Releases flavor and gelatin into the broth during slow simmering.
Potatoes
Add starch that gives the soup body and softens into tender pieces.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly after bringing to a boil. A gentle simmer extracts flavor from the bone or meat and keeps the meat tender. A hard rolling boil can make the broth cloudy and toughen the meat.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, meat, turnip, carrot, potato):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, meat, turnip, carrot, potato. 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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