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Common Carrot Soup

A soup made from boiled carrots blended with gravy-soup, seasoned with salt and cayenne, served hot with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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

  1. Boil the carrots in slightly salted water until very tender.

  2. Pound the carrots until smooth.

  3. Gradually mix in the boiling gravy-soup in a ratio of 1 quart to 1 lb of carrots.

  4. Pass the mixture through a strainer.

Season and serve

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and cayenne pepper.

  2. Serve 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.

  1. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. 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 thick texture of the soup when cooked and pureed.
Gravy-soup or bouillon
Adds liquid and savory flavor, thinning the pureed carrots into a soup.

The step that matters

Passing the mixture through a strainer. Pureed carrots can keep fibrous bits and lumps. Straining removes them, giving a smooth, even texture.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, bread. 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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