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Lamb Soup

A hearty lamb soup with rice, turnips, potatoes, onions, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 367 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lamb Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Wash the lamb and place it in a soup kettle with water.

  2. Add rice, turnips, onions, marjoram, salt, black pepper, and red pepper.

  3. Boil over low heat for about 1 hour.

  4. Add the quartered potatoes and sugar.

  5. When nearly done, stir in minced parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat on a dish garnished with parsley and the soup in a tureen.

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 + marjoramtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together367 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Marjoram + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Marjoram + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the broth is built on.
Rice
Thickens the broth slightly as its starch softens during simmering.
Turnips
Add body and a mildly sweet, earthy flavour as they soften.
Potatoes
Soften during simmering and thicken the soup while adding bulk.
White sugar
Balances the savoury and peppery flavours of the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, rice, turnip, marjoram, pepper, potato, sugar):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, rice, turnip, marjoram, pepper, potato, sugar. 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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