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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of onions, carrots, turnips, cabbage, tomatoes, and herbs, finished with butter, flour, and optional sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Carrot and turnip 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 vegetables

  1. Chop the onions, carrots, turnips, and cabbage finely.

  2. In a porcelain kettle, bring 3 quarts of water to a boil.

  3. Add the chopped onions, carrots, turnips, and simmer for 30 minutes.

  4. Add the chopped cabbage, stewed tomatoes, and a bunch of sweet herbs.

  5. Let the soup boil for 20 minutes, then strain through a sieve, rubbing the vegetables through.

Finish the soup

  1. In a bowl, beat the butter and flour to a cream.

  2. Season the soup with salt, pepper, and sugar.

  3. Stir in the sweet cream if using, then add the butter and flour mixture.

  4. Let it boil briefly before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried bread-chips or a poached egg in each dish.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they simmer, building the base flavour of the soup.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, giving the soup its colour and tangy depth.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded, smooth mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Flour
Mixed with butter to thicken the soup slightly and give it body.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid; stirring in the raw paste and then boiling briefly lets it cook through and thicken evenly without lumps.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, cabbage, butter, flour, 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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