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Clear Soup or Bouillon

A clear beef broth made with beef, onion, carrot, turnip, spices, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Clear Soup or Bouillon

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the beef, onion, carrot, turnip, salt, nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and cloves in butter in a soup kettle until it looks whitish.

  2. Pour in the stock from one boiled chicken.

  3. Boil the chicken in 1 gallon of water for 1 hour, then strain and set aside.

  4. Beat an egg and add it to the bouillon, allowing it to come to a boil, then strain before serving.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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
Adds savory meaty flavor and body to the broth.
Onion
Adds sweet aromatic flavor to the broth.
Carrot
Adds mild sweetness and aromatic flavor to the broth.
Turnip
Adds earthy, mildly sweet flavor to the broth.
Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and meat and carries flavor.
Egg
Coagulates as it heats, trapping particles so the broth clears.

The step that matters

Adding the egg and straining. Egg white proteins set as the broth heats, gathering suspended particles into a raft that strain-filtering removes, which keeps the soup clear. Letting it boil too hard or stirring can break up the raft and cloud the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, nutmeg, pepper, clove, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, nutmeg, pepper, clove, butter. 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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