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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of diced root vegetables simmered with butter, rice, and herbs.

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

Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dice the vegetables.

Make the soup

  1. In a frying pan, heat the butter and add all the vegetables except the white potato. Fry until light brown.

  2. Transfer the vegetables and butter to a soup kettle.

  3. Add the cold water, rice, bay leaf, salt, parsley, and celery.

  4. Boil slowly for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  5. Add the white potato and boil for an additional 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Season to taste and serve.

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 + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Sweet potato + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Thickens the broth as it cooks and adds body to the soup.
White potato
Breaks down slightly as it simmers, adding starch that thickens the soup.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and color as it softens in the broth.
Onion
Browns in butter to build savory flavor for the soup base.

The step that matters

Fry the vegetables until light brown. Browning the vegetables in butter caramelizes their natural sugars through the Maillard reaction, adding deeper, richer flavor to the broth. Pale frying yields a flatter soup.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, parsnip, potato, onion, celery, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsnip, potato, onion, celery, butter. 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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