Skip to main content
Main

Carrot Soup

A vegetable soup made with carrots, turnip, onions, celery, butter, spices, peas, anchovies, and water, thickened with flour.

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

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 ↓

Carrot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Shred the carrots, turnip, onions, and celery finely.

  2. In a stew-pan, melt the butter and add the shredded vegetables, cloves, peppercorns, and mace.

  3. Stir until the mixture becomes a pulp.

Simmer and strain

  1. Add the boiled peas, anchovies, and water; let it simmer for 2 hours.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  3. If the soup is not thick enough, mix in a little flour and butter.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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 the main body, sweetness and colour of the soup.
Butter
Enriches the soup with fat and carries the aromatics as they cook.
Onions
Add savoury depth and sweetness as they soften into the base.
Peas
Thicken the soup and add body once boiled to a pulp.
Flour
Thickens the soup if it is not thick enough after straining.

The step that matters

Stirring the vegetables to a pulp in butter. The vegetables must soften fully in the fat before water is added. Cooking them until they break down builds the base flavour and body, while stopping early leaves the soup grainy and thin after sieving.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, onion, celery, butter, clove, peas. 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.

More carrot soup recipes

Puree 5with Rice 3Creamy 3 See all 219 →

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipes