Name: Common Carrot Soup
Ingredients: 1 lb carrots; 4 cups water; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper; 4 cups boiling gravy-soup (or bouillon); Fried bread for serving

Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Common Carrot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

Boil the carrots in salted water until very tender.
Pound the carrots until extremely fine.
Gradually mix the pounded carrots with the boiling gravy-soup in a ratio of 1 quart to 12 ounces of carrots.
Pass the mixture through a strainer.
Season with salt and cayenne pepper.

Serve

Serve very hot with fried bread on the side.

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.

Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,555 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,628 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 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

Carrots: Provide the main body, sweetness and thickening starch of the soup once pureed.
Gravy-soup or bouillon: Supplies the savory broth base that carries the carrot flavor.

The step that matters

Gradually mix the pounded carrots with the boiling gravy-soup. Adding the purée slowly while the broth is hot helps it blend smoothly and evenly, so lumps do not form. Straining afterward removes any remaining fibers and bits for a smooth texture.