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Vegetable Soup

A simple soup of carrots, turnip, onion, leek, celery, parsley, butter, flour, water, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the vegetables and cut them into strips about the size of a short, thick match.

Cook the vegetables

  1. Melt the butter or fat in a stewpan and fry the vegetables very slowly until the fat is absorbed.

  2. Add the boiling water, ⅓ of the milk, salt, and pepper, and simmer gently until the vegetables are tender (5 to 10 minutes).

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the flour and the remaining milk smoothly together, pour into the saucepan, stir, and cook for a few minutes.

  2. Serve hot.

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 + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells and sets when heated in the liquid.
Butter or good fat
Carries flavour and softens the vegetables gently during the slow frying.
Milk
Adds body and creaminess to the broth.
Onion
Becomes sweet and aromatic as it cooks slowly in fat.
Carrots
Release natural sweetness and colour as they soften in the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour smoothly into the milk, then cooking it. Flour mixed into the milk before it goes into the hot soup disperses without lumps. Cooking it for a few minutes lets the starch swell and thicken the soup and removes the raw flour taste.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, leek, celery, parsley, butter, flour):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, leek, celery, parsley, butter, 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.

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