Skip to main content
Main

Winter Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with carrots, turnips, celery, onions, and optional rice or peas, served with suet dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Winter Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Combine the diced carrots, turnips, celery, and button onions in a pot.

  2. Add salt, sugar, and enough water to cover the vegetables.

  3. Half boil the vegetables.

Make the soup

  1. Add the vegetables to the broth and cook until tender.

  2. If desired, add rice, dried peas, or lentils to thicken the soup.

  3. Make small suet dumplings the size of an egg and boil them in broth or water.

  4. Serve the soup with dumplings added just 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.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Adds sweetness and body as the vegetables soften during cooking.
Turnips
Provides a mild, slightly peppery flavor and firm texture after cooking.
Button onions
Contribute sweetness and aroma as they soften in the broth.
Rice or dried peas or lentils
Starches from rice or legumes thicken the soup as they cook.

The step that matters

Half boil the vegetables. Partly cooking the vegetables in water before adding them to the broth helps them become tender at the same time. Denser roots such as turnips otherwise tend to stay firm while the rest of the soup overcooks.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, sugar, rice):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, sugar, rice. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipes