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Gumbo Soup

A hearty soup made with veal, chicken, carrots, turnips, oyster liquor, and gumbo seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the shin of veal and chicken in 4 quarts of water.

  2. Add the oyster liquor, carrots, and turnips.

  3. Shred the chicken and veal when tender.

Finish the soup

  1. Stir in the gumbo mixed in water or milk just before finishing.

  2. Drop in the oysters, but do not let the soup boil after adding them.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt and add mace if desired.

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. Veal + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  3. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Carrot + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Chicken + carrottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,338 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal shin
Gives the broth body and rich meaty flavor as it simmers.
Chicken
Adds savory depth to the broth and yields meat to shred back into the soup.
Oyster liquor
Supplies concentrated briny, oceanic flavor to the soup base.
Gumbo
Thickens the soup and gives it its characteristic body and earthy flavor.
Oysters
Add delicate briny flavor and tender texture when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Drop in the oysters, but do not let the soup boil after adding them. Oysters overcook quickly; boiling toughens their proteins, making them rubbery and shrinking them, while gentle heat keeps them plump and tender.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, chicken, oyster, carrot, turnip, milk):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, chicken, oyster, carrot, turnip, milk. 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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