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Portable Soup

A thick paste made from boiled calf, beef, veal, and mutton stock, clarified with egg whites and seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mutton are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Portable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the calves' feet, legs of beef, knuckles of veal, and legs of mutton in a large pot.

  2. Skim off the fatty matter that rises to the surface.

Clarify and reduce

  1. Clarify the broth by adding the egg whites and boiling until thick.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt.

  3. Continue boiling until the mixture reaches a very thick paste consistency.

Set

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it cool until solid.

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. Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Veal + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

  4. Mutton + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Veal + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,845 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Calves' feet
Release gelatin into the broth, giving the finished paste its firm set.
Legs of beef
Contribute meat flavour and body to the broth.
Knuckles of veal
Add gelatin and savoury depth to the broth.
Legs of mutton
Add rich meaty flavour to the broth.
Egg whites
Bind to impurities during boiling so they can be skimmed, clearing the broth.

The step that matters

Clarify the broth with egg whites. Egg white proteins coagulate as they heat and trap cloudy particles and fat, which then lift off for skimming. Adding them to a boil without thorough stirring or skimming leaves the paste cloudy and muddy in flavour.

“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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