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Meat Soups

A hearty beef soup made with onions, carrots, turnip, cloves, and salt, simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Meat Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Cover the bottom of a stewpan with sliced onions.

  2. Layer the beef and chopped bone on top of the onions.

  3. Add the carrot, turnip, and cloves.

  4. Set the stewpan over gentle heat for 10 minutes, shaking occasionally to prevent burning.

  5. Reduce heat and cook for over an hour until a blackish glaze forms at the bottom.

Simmer and strain

  1. Fill the stewpan with cold water and add salt.

  2. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for about an hour, skimming off fat and scum.

  3. Strain through a fine sieve into a basin and set aside for future use.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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
Provides the main savoury meat flavour and body to the broth.
Onions
Caramelise slowly on the base of the pan, adding sweetness and deep colour to the soup.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and body to the broth.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the broth.
Cloves
Add a warm, aromatic spice note to the broth.

The step that matters

Cooking until a blackish glaze forms. Slow browning of the onions, meat and bone creates the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, which deepen colour and savoury flavour. Heat that is too high burns the glaze and makes the soup bitter, so keep it gentle and stop before the glaze turns acrid.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, beef, carrot, turnip):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, beef, carrot, turnip. 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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