Name: Condensed Vegetable Soup
Ingredients: vegetables (your choice); 214 pounds beef extract; rice (to taste)

Why it works: Beef and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,265 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Condensed Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

vegetables (your choice)
214 pounds beef extract
rice (to taste)

Directions

Prepare your vegetables as you would for vegetable soup.
Omit the water and cook the vegetables in stock.
Add 214 pounds of beef extract.
To reduce cost, use more rice and fewer vegetables.

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.

Beef + ricetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,265 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetables: Provide the main body, flavour and texture of the soup.
Beef extract: Adds concentrated savoury, meaty flavour to the stock.
Rice: Adds starch that thickens the soup and bulks it out, replacing some vegetables.

“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.