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Soup

Winter Vegetable Soups

A hearty soup of diced carrots, turnips, celery, and onions, seasoned with salt and sugar, optionally thickened with rice, peas, or lentils.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and lentils match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Vegetable Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer

  1. In a pot, combine diced carrots, turnips, celery, and button onions.

  2. Add enough water to cover the vegetables and stir in the coarse sea salt and sugar.

  3. Half boil the vegetables until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. If desired, add rice, dried peas, or lentils to thicken the soup.

  2. Serve the soup hot, optionally adding small suet dumplings just before serving.

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. Turnip + lentilstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + lentilstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide sweetness and body as they soften during simmering.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and a tender, starchy texture to the broth.
Button onions
Contribute aromatic sweetness that deepens as they cook in the broth.
Rice
Releases starch into the liquid, helping thicken the soup if added.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, onion, sugar, rice, lentils):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, onion, sugar, rice, lentils. 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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