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Hodge Podge

A beef and vegetable soup simmered with beer, onions, carrots, turnips, celery, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Hodge Podge

Ingredients

Directions

Simmer the broth

  1. Boil the beef slices in water and small beer.

  2. Skim off the scum.

  3. Add onions, carrots, turnips, celery, pepper, and salt.

  4. Remove the meat when it is tender.

Strain and thicken

  1. Strain the soup.

  2. Melt butter in a saucepan.

  3. Mix in flour to prevent burning.

  4. Add the strained soup back to the pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Stew the beef until tender.

  2. Serve the soup with turnips and carrots.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main meaty flavor, and its collagen gives the broth body as it simmers.
Flour
Its starch swells when heated with fat and liquid, thickening the broth.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor, and forms the base for the flour mixture.
Onions
Release sugars as they cook, adding sweetness and depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Mixing flour into the melted butter. Flour must be stirred into the fat so its starch coats each grain evenly. Stirring prevents lumps and scorching, and the flour then thickens the strained soup smoothly when it is added back.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beer, beef, onion, carrot, celery, pepper, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, beef, onion, carrot, celery, pepper, butter. 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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