Name: Vegetable Soups
Ingredients: 1 lb. dried beans; 1 onion; ½ cup beef fat; salt to taste; pepper to taste; optional: 1 lb. pork or a ham bone; optional: pinch of red pepper; optional: chopped carrots; optional: chopped turnips

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 ↓

Vegetable Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

Soak the beans overnight in 2 quarts of water.
In the morning, drain the beans and cover with fresh water.

Simmer

Add the onion, beef fat, salt, and pepper.
If using, add pork or ham bone, red pepper, and any additional vegetables an hour before serving.
Simmer for 1 to 2 hours until the beans are tender.

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.

Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,690 recipes

Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).
Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together400 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,443 recipes

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

Dried beans: Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they soften during simmering.
Beef fat: Adds richness and flavor to the broth.
Onion: Adds savory aroma and sweetness as it cooks into the broth.

Swap the carrot

The recipe marks carrot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, beef, pepper, pork, turnip):

Leekfits about as well
Potatofits about as well
Okrafits about as well
Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, beef, pepper, pork, turnip. 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.