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Clear Amber Soup

A clear beef and chicken broth flavored with ham, vegetables, and caramel for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,097 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Clear Amber Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine beef bone, chicken, ham, and cold water in a soup kettle.

  2. Bring to a slow boil and cook for 4 hours.

  3. Fry minced onion in butter in a skillet until soft.

  4. Add the fried onion, parsley, carrot, parsnip, celery, cloves, salt, and pepper to the soup.

  5. Boil for 1 hour.

  6. Strain the soup.

  7. Let it sit overnight.

  8. Remove the fat from the top the next day.

Clarify and serve

  1. Carefully take the jelly, avoiding sediment, and mix it with the whites and shells of the eggs.

  2. Boil quickly for 1 minute.

  3. Skim carefully and strain through a bag until clear.

  4. Add caramel for color and heat just 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Beef + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Beef bone
Releases gelatin and flavor into the stock, giving body to the finished soup.
Chicken
Adds savory flavor and body to the long-simmered stock.
Eggs
Whites and shells trap suspended particles during boiling, which clears the stock.
Caramel
Deepens the amber color of the soup without changing its main flavor.

The step that matters

Boiling the egg-white raft. Boil only briefly after adding the egg whites and shells. The whites coagulate and trap cloudy particles; boiling too hard or stirring afterward breaks the raft and leaves the soup cloudy.

Swap the parsnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, chicken, ham, butter, onion, parsley, carrot):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, chicken, ham, butter, onion, parsley, carrot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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