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Boiled Beef, with Soup and Bread Dumplings

A soup of boiled beef with bread dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boiled Beef, with Soup and Bread Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine beef, sweet herbs, pepper, salt, ammunition bread, and water in an earthen pot.

  2. Boil for 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Portion the soup

  1. Remove the beef from the soup and weigh it.

  2. Divide the beef into 12 equal portions.

  3. Weigh the soup and bread mixture, then divide it into 12 equal portions.

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 + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  2. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 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

Beef
Provides the main meat; long simmering softens its connective tissue so it becomes tender.
Ammunition bread
Softens in the broth and thickens the soup, giving it body.

The step that matters

Boil for 2 hours and 15 minutes. Keeping the pot at a steady simmer over a long time breaks down the beef's connective tissue. A hard, rapid boil can toughen the meat and cloud the broth.

“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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