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A Cheap Soup

A hearty barley soup made with beef shin, onions, celery, turnip, and a flour‑thickened broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 145 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Cheap Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Wash the barley in cold water.

  2. In a soup pot, combine the barley and beef with enough cold water to cover.

  3. Bring to a boil, skim the surface, and add the onions.

  4. Reduce heat and simmer gently for 2 hours.

  5. Skim off any fat, then add the celery and turnip.

  6. Season with salt and boil for another 1.5 hours.

Thicken and serve

  1. Remove the meat and keep warm, then skim the broth.

  2. In a basin, mix 1 quart of broth with flour gradually, stirring well.

  3. Heat the mixture in a pan, stirring until it boils, then let it boil briefly.

  4. Serve the meat on a dish, strained sauce over it, and add optional garnishes.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Barley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley
Its starch and fiber thicken the broth and give the soup body and a chewy texture.
Beef shin or leg
Collagen from the connective tissue melts during long simmering, enriching the broth and softening the meat.
Onions
Release sugars and aromatic compounds into the broth, adding savory sweetness and depth.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavor and a fresh, vegetal note to the broth.
Flour
Starch granules swell when heated with liquid, thickening the strained broth into a sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the broth. Flour clumps if dumped in at once. Mixing it gradually into cool broth and stirring well disperses the starch, so it thickens evenly once heated.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, beef, onion, celery, turnip, flour):

  1. Capersthe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Parsleyfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, beef, onion, celery, turnip, 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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