Name: Gravy Soup
Ingredients: 1 to 1½ tablespoons of Gravina; 1 dessert spoonful of Ketchup or Worcestershire sauce; ½ cup of good Sherry or Madeira (optional)

Why it works: Ketchup and sherry work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 177 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Gravy Soup

Ingredients

1 to 1½ tablespoons of Gravina
1 dessert spoonful of Ketchup or Worcestershire sauce
½ cup of good Sherry or Madeira (optional)

Directions

Boil water for four to five minutes.
Add 1 to 1½ tablespoons of Gravina to the boiling water.
Stir in 1 dessert spoonful of Ketchup or Worcestershire sauce.
If desired, add ½ cup of good Sherry or Madeira.
Serve hot.

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.

Ketchup + sherrytop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together177 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Ketchup or worcestershire sauce: Adds tangy, savoury depth that rounds out the flavour of the broth.
Sherry or madeira: Adds aroma and a mellow sweetness when used.

“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.