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Common Turnip Soup

A soup made from turnips, butter, and broth, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,252 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Common Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Wash and wipe the turnips, then peel and weigh them.

  2. Cut the turnips into slices about ¼ inch thick.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a clean stew pan and add the turnips before the butter begins to boil.

  2. Stew the turnips gently for 45 minutes, ensuring they do not brown.

  3. Add the boiling soup to the turnips and let them simmer for another 45 minutes.

  4. Pulp the mixture through a coarse sieve or soup strainer.

  5. Return the pulp to the fire and stir until it boils for 3 to 4 minutes.

  6. Remove from heat, add salt and pepper if needed, and serve hot.

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. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Turnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the body of the soup, softening into a smooth pulp when stewed and strained.
Butter
Fat that gently cooks the turnips in the pan, adding richness and carrying flavour.
Soup or broth
Liquid that simmers with the turnips, thinning the pulp and adding savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Stew the turnips gently without browning. Turnips stewed over high heat or in browning butter take on bitter, caramelised notes and an uneven colour. Gentle heat softens them evenly so the finished soup stays pale, mild and smooth.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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