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Concentrated Vegetable Soup

A concentrated vegetable soup made from tomatoes, peppers, onions, corn or beans, okra, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and okra work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 327 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Concentrated Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato base

  1. Cook the tomatoes, pepper, and onion together.

  2. Put the mixture through a sieve to remove seeds.

  3. Cook down to a ketchup-like consistency.

  4. Measure the mixture.

Add vegetables and seasoning

  1. Add the corn or beans and okra.

  2. Add seasoning.

  3. Cook all together for 10 minutes.

Pack and process

  1. Pack into jars.

  2. Process quarts for 2 hours at boiling, or for 30 minutes under 10 lbs steam pressure.

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. Tomato + okratop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Okra + oniontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,099 recipes

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

  4. Corn + okratop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together161 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 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

Concentrated tomato pulp
Forms the body of the concentrate and provides the main liquid and acidity.
Corn or tiny lima beans
Adds starchy bulk and body to the soup base.
Okra
Adds body and a slight thickening from its natural mucilage.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the tomatoes with sweetness.

The step that matters

Cook down to a ketchup-like consistency. Tomato pulp contains a lot of water, and cooking it down concentrates flavor and thickens the base. Stopping too early leaves a thin product that may separate or spoil faster in the jar.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, corn, okra, sugar, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Eggplantfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, corn, okra, sugar, 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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