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Vegetable Soup

A simple soup made with onions, turnips, carrots, butter, water, herbs, pepper, salt, thickened with flour or oatmeal, served with pulled bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Shred the onions and fry them in sweet dripping or butter until browned.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the fried onions and water.

  3. Slice the turnips and carrots, then add them to the saucepan along with dried herbs, pepper, and salt.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Boil gently for 3 hours without a lid.

  2. Thicken the soup with flour or oatmeal and boil for an additional 10 minutes.

Prepare the bread

  1. To prepare pulled bread, tear the roll in half, remove the crumb, and crisp the pieces in the oven.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 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

Onions
Browning in fat builds deep, sweet flavour that carries through the whole soup.
Flour or oatmeal
Starch swells when boiled, thickening the soup's liquid to a fuller body.
Turnips
Vegetables soften during long gentle simmering, adding body and mild sweetness to the broth.
Carrots
Long simmering softens the carrots and releases natural sugars, adding sweetness and colour.

The step that matters

Thickening the soup. Flour or oatmeal must boil to fully swell and cook out its raw starch taste; adding it to a soup that is not boiling leaves lumps and a floury flavour.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, butter, pepper, 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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