Name: Puaixn Tomato Soup
Ingredients: 1 shin bone; 5 quarts cold water; 4 dozen tomatoes; salt to taste; pepper to taste

Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 17,923 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Puaixn Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

Break the shin bone and place it in a soup kettle with 5 quarts of cold water.
Bring to a boil, skimming off any foam.
After 1 hour, add 4 dozen unskinned tomatoes and boil until the soup reduces by half.

Strain and serve

Use a tomato masher to crush the tomatoes, then strain the mixture.
Return the strained soup to the kettle, remove the beef, and season with salt and pepper 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together17,923 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

Shin bone: Releases flavor and body into the water as it simmers, forming the base of the soup.
Tomatoes: Add acidity, color and body; reducing them concentrates their flavor and thickens the soup.

“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.