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Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with spinach, parsnip, onions, carrot, celery, turnips, lettuce, parsley, chervil, tarragon, butter, salt, pepper, water, flour, catsup, and buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter with salt and pepper.

  2. Slice the onions, turnips, carrot, and parsnip.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables, spinach, celery, lettuces, parsley, chervil, and tarragon to the butter.

  4. Pour in 2 quarts of hot water and stew until the vegetables are tender.

  5. If the soup is not thick enough, mix in a little flour and butter with some catsup.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the soup through a sieve.

  2. Serve with buttered toast cut into dice.

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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

  4. Spinach + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melted at the start to enrich the soup and carry the seasoning and vegetable flavour.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth as they soften in the stewing liquid.
Turnips
Contribute body and a mild sweetness to the stewed vegetable base.
Flour
Thickens the soup when it is not thick enough, through a butter roux.
Lettuces
Soften during stewing, adding moisture and a delicate vegetal body.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, parsnip, carrot, celery, turnip, lettuce, parsley):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Endivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, parsnip, carrot, celery, turnip, lettuce, parsley. 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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