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Beef Soup

A hearty beef soup with onions, carrots, turnips, thyme, parsley, celery, and toasted bread cubes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Remove all flesh from the leg bone of the beef and wash the meat.

  2. Place the meat in a pot and add black pepper, salt, onions, carrots, and turnips.

  3. Pour in 3 quarts of water, cover, and simmer gently for 5 hours.

  4. Skim off any scum that rises to the surface.

  5. After 4 hours, add thyme, parsley, and celery or celery seed.

Finish and serve

  1. In a skillet, melt brown sugar until dark, then gradually stir in a ladle of soup.

  2. Strain the mixture and combine it with the soup.

  3. Remove the thyme and parsley, place the best pieces of meat in a tureen, and pour the soup and vegetables over them.

  4. Add toasted bread cubes and serve.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Hind shin of beef
Breaks down during long simmering to give the broth body and rich, meaty flavor.
Onions
Release sweetness and savory depth into the broth as they cook slowly.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the broth as they soften.
Turnips
Contribute a mild, slightly peppery sweetness as they cook into the broth.
Brown sugar
Melted until dark, it adds caramel flavor and color to the soup.

The step that matters

Melting the brown sugar until dark. Sugar turns from clear to amber and then bitter if heated too far. Stop once it is a deep brown, before it burns, or the soup will taste acrid.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, carrot, turnip, thyme, parsley, celery):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, carrot, turnip, thyme, parsley, celery. 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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