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Macaroni Soup

A hearty beef broth with macaroni, vegetables, and tomato ketchup, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley 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 ↓

Macaroni Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Place the beef in a large pot with 4 quarts of water, onion, carrot, turnip, and celery.

  2. Bring to a boil and simmer for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Remove the grease from the broth and pour it into a soup kettle.

Finish and serve

  1. Season the broth with salt and add the broken macaroni and tomato ketchup.

  2. Boil for 30 to 45 minutes until the macaroni is tender.

  3. Serve hot, garnished with chopped parsley.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the rich meaty flavor and savory body of the broth as it simmers.
Macaroni
Adds starchy bulk and tender body to the soup as it cooks in the broth.
Tomato ketchup
Adds a little sweetness and acidity that rounds out the broth's flavor.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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