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Stock for Vegetable Soups

A clear vegetable stock made by simmering beans, peas, carrot, onion, celery leaves, herbs, cloves, mace, pepper, and salt in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stock for Vegetable Soups

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the haricot beans, split peas, carrot, onion, celery leaves, parsley, herbs, cloves, mace, pepper, and salt in 2 quarts of water for 3 to 4 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture to obtain the stock.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Break down during long simmering to add body and thickness to the stock.
Split peas
Dissolve slowly during simmering, giving the stock body and a fuller texture.
Carrot
Releases natural sweetness and aromatic flavour into the simmering liquid.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and sweetness as it softens and gives up its flavour.

The step that matters

Simmering for 3 to 4 hours. A gentle, steady simmer extracts flavour and body from the vegetables and legumes without clouding the liquid. A hard rolling boil can break ingredients apart and make the stock cloudy and greasy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, peas, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, peas, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove. 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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