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Veal Soup

A clear soup made with veal knuckle, water, salt, onions, turnips, carrots, sweet herbs, celery, thickened with flour, served with dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Veal Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine the knuckle of veal and 4 quarts of water in a pot. Add 4 teaspoons of salt.

  2. Bring to a boil and cook for 1 hour.

  3. Add the sliced onions, diced turnips, diced carrots, sweet herbs, and chopped celery.

  4. Once the vegetables are tender, strain the soup back into the pot.

Thicken and add dumplings

  1. Thicken the soup with flour mixed smoothly with a little water, then add finely chopped parsley.

  2. For dumplings, mix 1 teaspoon of butter with 2 teaspoons of flour and enough milk or water to make a soft dough.

  3. Drop the dumplings into the boiling soup, about the size of a hickory nut.

  4. If using noodles, add them to the soup and boil for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat with the vegetables around it, and offer drawn butter or meat sauce on the side.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Knuckle of veal
Gives the broth its meaty body and rich flavour as it simmers.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma to the broth as they soften.
Turnips
Soften during cooking and contribute mild sweetness and body to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as starch swells when heated in liquid.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with flour mixed smoothly with a little water. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, so it must first be blended into a smooth slurry. Starch then swells as the soup heats, giving body without lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, turnip, carrot, celery, flour, parsley, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, turnip, carrot, celery, flour, parsley, butter. 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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