Skip to main content
Main

Another Winter Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of onions, potatoes, turnips, celery, carrots, and herbs, finished with anchovy or herring and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Another Winter Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry the onions, potatoes, and turnips in butter or dripping until softened.

  2. Toast a crust of bread until brown and hard.

  3. In a large pot, combine the fried vegetables, toasted bread, celery, herbs, salt, pepper, and water.

  4. Stew gently for 4 hours.

  5. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

Finish the soup

  1. Add chopped carrot, celery, parsley, anchovy or herring, and cayenne to the strained broth.

  2. Boil until the vegetables are tender.

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. Celery + carrottop 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. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, building the savoury base of the soup.
Potatoes
Break down during long stewing, thickening the broth and giving body.
Turnips
Add earthy flavour and body as they soften in the stewed broth.
Butter or dripping
Fat for frying the vegetables, carrying flavour and adding richness.
Celery
Contributes aromatic, savoury flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture through a sieve. Straining after the long stew separates the liquid from the softened solids, so the broth is smooth and clear before the fresh vegetables are added and boiled until tender.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes