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Carrot Scup with Rice

A creamy carrot soup with rice, simmered in stock and milk, finished with butter, cornflour, cream, 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 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 ↓

Carrot Scup with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cut the carrots, onion, celery, and leek into small pieces.

  2. Cook the vegetables in hot butter for 10-15 minutes without browning.

Make the soup

  1. Add the stock and simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 40 minutes.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve back into the pot.

  3. Add the milk, salt, pepper, and a little nutmeg, then bring to a boil.

  4. Mix the cornflour with a small amount of stock or milk, pour it into the soup, and stir for a few minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add a pinch of sugar, the cream, and the cooked rice, then serve.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the main body, colour and sweet flavour of the soup.
Butter
Carries the aromatics' flavour and softens the vegetables without browning them.
Cornflour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the soup's flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel at the end.
Cooked rice
Adds body and a soft, starchy texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the cornflour mixture. Cornflour must be mixed into cold liquid first, then stirred into hot soup and cooked for a few minutes. Added dry or unmixed, it clumps, and without enough stirring and heat the starch does not fully thicken the soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, carrot, celery, leek, butter, cream, rice):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, carrot, celery, leek, butter, cream, rice. 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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