Skip to main content
Main

Turnip Soup

A soup of turnips, stock, milk, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Turnip Soup

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Peel the turnips and slice them thinly.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the turnips, and cook gently for 15 to 20 minutes.

  3. Add the stock and simmer for 40 minutes, or until the turnips are tender.

  4. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve and return it to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the milk and bring to a boil.

  2. Mix the flour with a little stock or milk until smooth, then pour it into the soup.

  3. Stir and cook for 5 to 6 minutes.

  4. Season with sugar, nutmeg, salt, and pepper to taste, 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.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, becoming soft and sweet as they simmer and then thicken when sieved.
Butter
Fat that softens the turnips gently and carries flavour into the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup so it has a smooth, body-rich texture.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the soup's flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour thickener. Flour mixed into hot liquid clumps unless first blended smoothly with a little cold liquid. Once stirred smooth and simmered for several minutes, the starch swells and thickens the soup while the raw flour taste cooks off.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, nutmeg, pepper, sugar. 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.

More turnip soup recipes

Carrot 7 See all 93 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes