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Cottage Soups

A hearty beef and vegetable soup with potatoes, carrots, turnips, cabbage, rice, and bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cottage Soups

about 5 pints

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, fry the beef, bacon, cabbage, and onion in butter or dripping until browned.

  2. Add 1 gallon of water and bring to a gentle simmer.

  3. Stir in the carrots and cook for 3 hours over low heat.

  4. Add the turnips and rice in the last 30 minutes of cooking.

  5. Mash the potatoes and pass them through a colander, then add to the pot.

  6. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, keeping the pot covered.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, making about 5 pints of soup.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  4. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

Beef
Browns in the pot and simmers until tender, giving the soup its meaty body and flavor.
Potatoes
Mashed and passed through a colander, they thicken the broth and give it a smooth, hearty body.
Rice
Absorbs liquid as it cooks, adding body and thickening the soup.
Bacon
Renders fat during frying, adding savory, smoky flavor to the base.

The step that matters

Adding the turnips and rice late. Added in the last 30 minutes, they stay intact and keep their texture; cooking them for the full three hours would let them break down and turn the soup mushy.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, potato, rice, carrot, turnip, onion, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato, rice, carrot, turnip, onion, butter. 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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