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Plain Economical Soup

A clear broth made with beef, turkey or chicken, vegetables, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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 ↓

Plain Economical Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the beef bone, steak, and turkey or chicken rack in a pot with water.

  2. Add chopped carrots, turnips, onion, cloves, pepper, and salt.

  3. Boil gently for 4 hours.

  4. Strain through a colander, mashing the vegetables to pass through.

Finish and serve

  1. Skim off the fat and return the soup to the pot.

  2. Mix flour with water and stir into the soup.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes and serve with snippets of toast.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Flour
Thickens the broth as it cooks, giving the soup a fuller body.
Beef bone
Releases gelatin and savory flavor into the water during long gentle simmering.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body as they soften and break down into the broth.
Turnips
Contribute mild sweetness and soft texture as they cook and mash into the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and water into the soup. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps easily. Mixing it smoothly with cold water first and stirring it in while the soup simmers helps it disperse and thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, turkey, carrot, turnip, clove, pepper, flour):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, turkey, carrot, turnip, clove, pepper, flour. 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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