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Okra Soup

A slow‑cooked beef and okra soup with tomatoes, onions, thyme, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Okra and tomato 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 ↓

Okra Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine beef, water, and a little salt in a soup pot.

  2. Bring to a boil and skim off any foam.

  3. Add sliced okra, tomatoes, shredded onions, thyme, salt, and pepper.

  4. Reduce heat and let it boil slowly for 6 hours, stirring occasionally.

  5. If the soup reduces too much, add more water half an hour before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve in a tureen, discarding the beef and thyme.

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. Okra + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Okra + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Tomato + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef shin or shoulder clod
Releases flavour and gelatin into the broth during long, slow simmering.
Okra
Its natural mucilage thickens the soup as it cooks.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, giving the broth a rounded, tangy flavour.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury depth as they soften into the broth.

The step that matters

Slow simmer and top up water. A gentle boil over six hours lets the beef turn tender and the okra thicken the broth. Boiling hard can cloud the soup and reduce it too quickly, so adding water near the end keeps the consistency right.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Eggplantfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, okra, tomato, thyme, 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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