Skip to main content
Main

Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions, celery, and herbs simmered in butter and water, finished with ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Vegetable Soup

Why it works: Carrot and celery 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

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the potatoes, carrots, turnips, and onions.

  2. In a large pot, fry the vegetables in butter until slightly browned.

  3. Pour in 2 quarts of boiling water.

  4. Add half the head of celery, sweet herbs, pepper, salt, and the toasted bread crust.

Simmer and strain

  1. Simmer slowly for 4 hours.

  2. Strain the soup through a coarse cloth or sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the strained soup to the pot with the remaining celery, one carrot, and one turnip cut into shapes.

  2. Stew until tender, then add ketchup 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. Carrot + celerytop 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. Turnip + celerytop 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. Potato + carrottop 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

Butter
Browns the vegetables first, adding a richer, roasted flavour to the soup base.
Onions
Build the flavour base of the soup as they soften and release their sweetness.
Potatoes
Break down slightly during long simmering, adding body and thickening the soup.
Celery
Contributes savoury, aromatic flavour to the broth during simmering.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables in butter. Cook until only slightly browned: this builds flavour through browning reactions, but over-browning turns the soup bitter and dark.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

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

More vegetable soup recipes

Spring 46Beef 45Winter 31French 11Lentil 9Clear 8 See all 425 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes