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Soup for Invalids

A hearty mutton or beef soup simmered for hours, seasoned with salt, peppercorns, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mutton and allspice work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 322 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Soup for Invalids

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mince the mutton or beef until finely ground.

  2. In a pot, combine the minced meat and water.

  3. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 3 hours or until reduced to 1 quart.

  4. Season with salt and any desired flavorings like peppercorns and allspice.

  5. Strain the soup through a gravy strainer 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. Mutton + allspicetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together322 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton or beef
Provides the main flavor and, once simmered, the body of the soup.
Water
Serves as the cooking liquid that extracts flavor from the meat during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Simmer until reduced to 1 quart. A long, gentle simmer draws flavor from the meat into the liquid while evaporation concentrates it. Boiling too hard can cloud the broth, and stopping too early leaves it thin and weak.

“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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