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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with beef, vegetables, rice, and flour, simmered until tender.

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

Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the soup

  1. Place the beef in a stew pan with cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Mix the flour with ½ cup of cold water and stir into the boiling stock.

  3. Add the rice and simmer for one hour.

  4. Add the onion, celery, and carrot, and cook for one hour longer.

  5. Then add the turnips, potatoes, salt, and pepper, and simmer for another 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. 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.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 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

Beef
Provides meaty flavor, and becomes tender during long simmering.
Reindeer flour
Its starch thickens the stock as it heats in the liquid.
Rice
Releases starch during simmering, adding body to the broth.
Potato
Its starch softens and adds body and substance to the broth.
Onion
Builds aromatic flavor that deepens as it cooks.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and color to the broth.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with cold water before stirring it in. Flour dropped dry or into hot liquid clumps, because its starch coats the outside of each particle before it can disperse. Mixing it with cold water first lets the starch spread evenly, so it thickens the stock smoothly as it heats.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, celery, carrot, potato, turnip, rice, 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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