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Scotch Broth Without Meat

A hearty vegetable broth with barley, oatmeal, and bread, served without meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Scotch Broth Without Meat

two quarts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the pearl barley overnight in cold water and rinse well.

  2. Dice the turnip, carrot, and onion into quarter-inch pieces.

  3. Chop the celery into small bits.

  4. Fry the diced bread in hot drippings until brown, then drain on paper.

Make the soup

  1. Combine all ingredients in a soup kettle with boiling water, salt, pepper, and cayenne.

  2. Simmer the mixture slowly for one hour.

  3. Mix the oatmeal with cold water to form a smooth batter and add it to the soup, simmering for another hour.

  4. Add boiling water to the soup to make two quarts, adjust seasoning, and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + barleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pearl barley
Softens during long simmering and thickens the broth with starch and body.
Oatmeal
Mixed to a smooth batter and added to thicken the soup as it simmers.
Turnip
Adds sweetness and body as it cooks down into the broth.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and color as it softens during the long simmer.
Onion
Adds savory depth and aroma as it cooks into the broth.

The step that matters

Adding the oatmeal batter. Stirring the oatmeal in as a smooth batter, rather than dry, prevents lumps. Starch from the oats thickens the broth as it simmers, so the batter needs to be fully blended before it goes in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, barley, pepper, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, barley, pepper, 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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