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Beef Soup

A hearty beef soup with broth, noodles, and assorted vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 897 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Place the soup bone or bony meat in a pot and cover with plenty of water.

  2. Add a small handful of coarse sea salt.

  3. Bring to a boil over high heat, skimming off any foam until the broth is clear.

  4. Reduce heat to maintain a gentle simmer until the meat is very tender, then remove the meat.

Make the noodles and finish

  1. Chop the meat, season well, and mix with 1 cup of stock in a deep dish.

  2. For the noodles, beat 2 eggs lightly and add flour until the mixture is smooth and can be strung from a spoon.

  3. Bring the stock to a hard boil and string in the noodle mixture to cook.

  4. For vegetable soup, boil chopped vegetables until tender and serve with soft noodles made from 1 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. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  5. Cabbage + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,840 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Soup bone or bony meat
Releases flavour and gelatin into the broth as it simmers, giving body and savoriness.
Eggs
Bind the flour into a dough that holds together and sets firm when cooked in the broth.
Flour
Gives the egg mixture enough body to form noodles that hold their shape in liquid.
Potato
Adds starch that softens during cooking and thickens the soup slightly.

The step that matters

Skimming the broth at the boil. Foam rising from the meat contains coagulated proteins and impurities. Skimming it early keeps the broth clear and clean-tasting rather than cloudy and greasy.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, egg, flour, potato, cabbage, celery, turnip):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg, flour, potato, cabbage, celery, 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.

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