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Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of diced potatoes, carrots, turnips, celery, and onion simmered in beef dripping with butter, parsley, salt, and pepper.

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

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 ↓

Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the vegetables and cut them into small cubes.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, cook the carrots, turnips, celery, and onion in the beef dripping until they are a delicate brown.

  2. Add the diced potatoes and cook for 2 minutes longer.

  3. Pour in the boiling water, cover, and simmer for 1 hour. Add more water as needed to maintain 1 quart of liquid.

  4. Stir in the butter, parsley, and seasonings before serving.

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 + 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. Carrot + turniptop 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef dripping
Fat that browns the vegetables and carries their flavor into the soup.
Potatoes
Soften during simmering and thicken the broth slightly as their starch releases.
Turnip
Adds bulk and a mildly sweet, peppery flavor as it cooks down.
Onion
Builds savory depth as it softens and browns with the other vegetables.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables in the dripping. Cooking the carrots, turnip, celery and onion until golden develops savory, toasted flavors through browning reactions. Stopping early leaves the soup tasting flat, while over-browning can make it bitter.

Swap the onion

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

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

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