Skip to main content
Main

Plain Brown Soup Stock

A beef stock made by simmering beef shin, bones, and vegetables for 8‑10 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Plain Brown Soup Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Wipe the meat with a wet cloth, cut it from the bone, and slice it thinly across the grain.

  2. Reserve several of the largest slices with all the marrow.

Make the stock

  1. Put the remaining meat and bones into 6 quarts of cold water with the spices and herbs.

  2. Set on the fire for at least 1 hour to come to a boil.

  3. Brown the chopped vegetables in the same fat before adding them to the soup.

  4. Simmer for 8 to 10 hours and then strain.

Finish and serve

  1. If convenient, broil the reserved slices until very brown; if not, fry them in the marrow without scorching the fat.

  2. The next day, remove the fat and use the stock plain for beef broth or with macaroni, vermicelli, rice, or vegetables.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef shin
Lean meat and bone release flavor and gelatin into the stock during long simmering.
Onion
Browned onion adds sweetness and deeper color to the finished stock.
Carrot
Browned carrot adds sweetness and body to the flavor base.
Celery
Browned celery adds aromatic depth to the stock.
Turnip
Browned turnip adds mild sweetness and aroma to the stock.

The step that matters

Simmer for 8 to 10 hours and then strain. Long, gentle simmering slowly extracts collagen and flavor from bone and meat. A hard boil makes the stock cloudy and greasy, so keep it at a bare simmer.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, meat, pepper, onion, parsley, carrot, 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes