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Barley Soup

A beef broth with barley, onion, carrot, celery, cloves, bay leaf, butter, and flour paste.

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 ↓

Barley Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Cover beef with cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Skim the surface well, then simmer for 3 hours.

Finish the soup

  1. Add barley, onion, bay leaf, carrot, celery, cloves, and butter one hour before serving.

  2. Mix flour with cold water to form a paste and stir into the soup 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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Barley + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue, making the broth rich and the meat tender.
Barley
Swells as it cooks, adding body and a chewy texture to the soup.
Flour
Mixed with water into a paste, it thickens the broth as it heats.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavor and gives the soup a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour paste. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps and stays raw-tasting. Mixing it into cold water first to form a smooth paste lets it disperse evenly and thicken the soup without lumps.

Swap the clove

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, barley, onion, carrot, celery, butter, flour. 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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