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Breakfast Dish

A soup of cold beef or mutton in stock, thickened with browned flour, served over toasted bread and garnished with lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Breakfast Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cold beef or mutton finely.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, combine the chopped meat with the soup stock.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and ground cloves.

  3. Thicken the mixture with browned flour.

Serve

  1. Pour the hot mixture over the toasted bread pieces.

  2. Garnish with slices of lemon and serve immediately.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold beef or mutton
Provides the main meat flavor and body of the soup.
Soup stock
Supplies the liquid base and savory flavor for the soup.
Browned flour
Thickens the broth and adds a toasted, nutty flavor.
Toasted bread
Soaks up the hot broth, giving the soup a soft, substantial texture.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, clove, flour, bread):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, clove, flour, bread. 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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