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Good Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of onions, turnip, carrots, potatoes, butter, milk, sago, and parsley, served with bread fried in dripping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Good Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the vegetables and cut them into small squares.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the vegetables and sugar, and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  2. Add the boiling water and simmer for about 1½ hours, or until the vegetables are tender, stirring often to prevent burning.

  3. Strain the soup through a wire sieve or colander into a basin, rubbing the vegetables through with a wooden spoon.

  4. Pour the strained soup back into the saucepan, add the milk and sago, stir, and simmer for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the chopped parsley and season to taste.

  2. Serve with squares of bread fried in dripping or toast.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + potatotop 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

Potatoes
Break down during simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Sago
Swells in the simmering liquid, thickening the soup further.
Milk
Adds richness and softens the flavour of the vegetable base.
Butter
Softens the vegetables and carries flavour at the start of cooking.
Onions
Build the savoury base of the soup as they soften and sweeten.

The step that matters

Simmering the vegetables in the boiling water. Stirring often keeps starches and sugars from sticking and scorching on the bottom of the pan, which would give the soup a burnt taste. Cooking until fully tender ensures the vegetables break down properly when rubbed through the sieve.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, potato, butter, parsley, milk, sugar):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, potato, butter, parsley, milk, sugar. 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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