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Vegetable Soup

A simple vegetable soup made with potatoes, carrots, turnip, celery, onion, and seasoned with beef dripping, butter, parsley, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

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 ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, cook the carrot, turnip, celery, and onion in beef dripping until they are a delicate brown.

  2. Add the potatoes and cook for 2 minutes longer.

  3. Pour in the boiling water, cover, and simmer for 40 minutes, adding more water as needed to keep the liquid at 1 cup.

  4. Stir in the butter, parsley, and season with salt and pepper.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Potatoes
Break down during simmering to thicken the broth and give the soup body.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and firm texture as it softens in the fat.
Butter
Stirred in at the end to add richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Beef dripping
Fat for browning the vegetables, building savory flavor.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables in beef dripping. Cooking the carrot, turnip, celery, and onion until delicately browned develops savory flavors through the Maillard reaction. Pale vegetables give a flatter, blander soup.

Swap the onion

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

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

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