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Cream of Turnip Soup

A soup made with lamb or mutton broth, diced turnips, and a beaten egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and turnip work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 276 recipes. Both carry geraniol, which smells rose, geranium. The science ↓

Cream of Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bring the broth to a boil.

  2. Add the diced turnips and cook for 30 minutes until very tender.

  3. Rub the cooked turnips through a colander back into the broth.

  4. Return the mixture to the heat and stir in the beaten egg.

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. Lamb + turniptop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together276 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  2. Lamb + eggtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,204 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Turnip + eggtop 36% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Young white turnips
Break down into a smooth purée that thickens the soup and gives it body.
Egg
Heat-sets into the soup when stirred in, adding richness and a silkier body.
Lamb or mutton broth
Forms the liquid base and carries the savory flavor of the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg. Egg proteins set when heated, so the mixture must be hot enough to thicken but kept below a hard boil. Boiling after adding the egg can curdle it into grainy bits.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, egg):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, egg. 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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