Skip to main content
Main

Cooking and Other Recipes

A hearty beef soup with navy beans, cabbage, onions, potatoes, turnip, carrot, tomato, red pepper, parsley, cornmeal, and wheat flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Cooking and Other Recipes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the beef.

  2. Place the beef in a soup kettle with cold water and let it stand for 30 minutes.

  3. Wash and soak the navy beans overnight.

Make the soup

  1. Add the navy beans to the kettle with the beef and boil until tender.

  2. Add salt and black pepper to taste.

  3. Add cabbage, onions, potatoes, turnip, carrot, tomato, red pepper, and parsley to the kettle.

  4. Cook slowly, adding water as needed to maintain the quantity.

Thicken and serve

  1. Dissolve cornmeal and wheat flour in cold water.

  2. Add the mixture to the soup to thicken before serving.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  3. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 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

Beef upper shank
Provides meat and rich flavour as it simmers slowly in the broth.
Navy beans
Add body and starch, softening as they cook to thicken the soup.
Potatoes
Release starch as they cook, adding body and substance to the broth.
Cornmeal and wheat flour
Starches that swell when dissolved and heated, thickening the soup.

The step that matters

Dissolving the cornmeal and flour before adding. Starch clumps if stirred into hot liquid dry. Dissolving it in cold water first lets the granules disperse, so the soup thickens smoothly when heated.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, beans, onion, potato, turnip, carrot, tomato):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, beans, onion, potato, turnip, carrot, tomato. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipes