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Plain White Soup

A clear soup made with veal knuckle, fowls, bacon or ham, lemon thyme, onions, carrot, turnip, celery, peppercorns, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Plain White Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the knuckle of veal well.

  2. Put the veal, fowls, bacon or ham, lemon thyme, onions, carrot, turnip, celery, peppercorns, and mace into a soup kettle.

Make the soup

  1. Scum carefully and boil for 2.5 hours.

  2. Strain the soup; it should form a jelly.

Serve

  1. When re-warming, remove the top fat and clear the soup from sediment.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Knuckle of veal
Releases gelatin and body into the broth, so it sets into a jelly when chilled.
Fowls
Add meaty flavour and additional gelatin and richness to the stock.
Bacon or ham
Adds smoky, savoury depth to the broth.
Onions
Build the aromatic base and sweetness as they simmer.

The step that matters

Scumming carefully. Skimming the foam that rises while the stock first simmers removes coagulated proteins and impurities. Leaving them in makes the soup cloudy and muddy in flavour, so it will not clear.

“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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