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Common Turnip Soup

A mild soup made from young turnips simmered in veal or mutton stock, seasoned with butter, salt, white pepper, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Common Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Wash, wipe, and peel the turnips.

  2. Slice them into ¼ inch thick pieces.

Stew the turnips

  1. Melt the butter in a clean pot over low heat.

  2. Add the turnips and gently stew for 45 minutes without browning.

  3. If desired, add sliced onion while stewing the turnips.

Make the soup

  1. Prepare the stock and bring it to a boil.

  2. Pour it over the turnips and let them simmer for another 45 minutes.

  3. Pass the mixture through a coarse sieve or soup strainer.

  4. Return it to the pot and stir while boiling for 3 minutes.

  5. Skim off any scum.

  6. Season with salt, white pepper, and sugar as needed.

  7. Add a little cream before serving for improved color.

  8. 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.

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 + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Veal + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,841 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the body of the soup and, once passed through a sieve, thicken it with their starch and fibre.
Butter
Gently cooks the turnips in fat, carrying flavour without browning them.
Veal or mutton stock
Provides the liquid base and savoury depth for the soup.

The step that matters

Stew the turnips without browning. Over low heat with butter, the turnips should soften gently. If they brown, the Maillard reaction creates bitter, toasted flavours that clash with the mild, sweet soup intended.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, butter, veal, white pepper, sugar, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits about as well
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, veal, white pepper, sugar, cream. 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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