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Soup

Winter Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, celery, and sweet herbs simmered in butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Winter Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat.

  2. Add the turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, celery, and sweet herbs.

  3. Fry the vegetables until browned.

  4. Pour in the water.

  5. Season with salt and pepper.

  6. Bring the soup to a boil.

  7. Reduce the mixture until it reaches three quarts.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with fried toasted bread.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat for frying the vegetables, carrying flavour and helping them brown.
Turnips
Form the bulk of the soup, adding body and a mildly sweet, earthy flavour as they cook.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the soup as they soften in the broth.
Potatoes
Break down slightly as they cook, thickening the soup and giving it a fuller texture.
Onions
Build savoury depth when fried, and their sugars brown to add flavour to the base.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savoury flavour and body to the soup base.

The step that matters

Fry the vegetables until browned. Browning caramelises the natural sugars and proteins on the vegetables' surfaces, creating deeper flavour. Pale, under-fried vegetables give a flatter, blander soup, so colour them well before adding water.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, potato, celery, butter, pepper, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, potato, celery, butter, 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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