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Soup

A Good Vegetable Soup Maigre

A lean vegetable soup made with butter, onions, turnips, carrots, celery, spinach, parsley, bread and seasonings, simmered in water and finished with wine or ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

A Good Vegetable Soup Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan over low heat, shaking the pan occasionally.

  2. Add the sliced onion, diced turnip, diced carrot, chopped celery, shredded spinach, and parsley, then toss the vegetables for 10 minutes.

  3. Pour in the boiling water and add the toasted bread. Simmer for 1 hour.

  4. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve (tamis).

Finish the soup

  1. Add the boiled and diced turnips and carrots to the soup.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, Cayenne, and pounded mace. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  3. Before serving, stir in the white wine or mushroom ketchup.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Turnip + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together320 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

Butter
Melted fat that softens the vegetables and carries flavour without browning them.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavour and body to the broth as it softens and breaks down.
Toasted bread
Thickens the soup as it simmers and, once sieved, gives it a smooth body.
Turnip
Contributes mild sweetness and body as it cooks down into the soup.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and colour, and thickens the purée as it softens.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a fine sieve. Pressing the cooked vegetables and bread through a fine sieve breaks them into small particles and removes fibrous pieces, which gives the soup a smooth texture. Skipping or rushing this leaves the soup coarse and stringy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, turnip, carrot, celery, spinach, parsley, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, turnip, carrot, celery, spinach, parsley, bread. 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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