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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of onions, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and bread, simmered in butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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

Make the soup base

  1. Fry the onions, potatoes, carrots, and turnips in the butter until softened.

  2. Pour in the boiling water and add the toasted bread, celery, white pepper, and salt.

  3. Stew gently for 4 hours, then strain through a coarse cloth.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the thinly-sliced carrot, celery, and turnip to the strained soup and stew until tender.

  2. Optionally, stir in a spoonful of tomato ketchup before serving.

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. Potato + carrottop 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

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, building the soup's base flavour.
Potatoes
Break down during stewing to thicken the soup and give it body.
Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and carries flavour into the soup.
Toasted bread
Adds toasty, browned aroma and some body to the stewed broth.

The step that matters

Straining through a coarse cloth after the long stew. Stewing for hours breaks the vegetables down fully; straining removes the fibrous solids so the soup is smooth before the sliced vegetables are added back for texture.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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