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Purée, or Vegetable Soup

A savory vegetable purée made with onions, turnips, carrot, potatoes, ham, and parsley, simmered in broth and milk.

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 ↓

Purée, or Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine onions, turnips, carrot, potatoes, butter, ham, and parsley in a stewpan.

  2. Cook over medium heat for 10 minutes.

  3. Stir in flour and mix well.

  4. Add broth and boiling milk.

  5. Bring to a boil while stirring.

  6. Season with salt and sugar.

  7. Strain through a fine sieve.

  8. Return to the stewpan and boil again. Skim.

Serve

  1. Serve with croutons.

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

Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the soup.
Flour
Thickens the broth and milk, giving the soup body.
Potatoes
Break down during cooking, adding body and starch to the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softness to the soup.
Broth
Forms the liquid base that carries the vegetable flavors.

The step that matters

Stir in flour and mix well. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly; mixing it into the softened vegetables and butter first helps it blend smoothly and thicken the soup evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, potato, butter, ham, parsley, flour. 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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