Skip to main content
Main

Beef, Roast, and Boiled Turkey Soup

A hearty soup made from turkey and beef bones, carrots, turnips, onions, and spices, thickened with flour and served over bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef, Roast, and Boiled Turkey Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine the turkey liquor, turkey bones, and beef bones in a soup pot.

  2. Add the chopped carrots, turnips, onions, cloves, pepper, salt, and tomatoes if available.

  3. Boil the mixture for 4 hours.

  4. Strain the mixture.

Thicken and serve

  1. Return the soup to the pot.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold water and stir the flour mixture into the soup.

  3. Allow the soup to boil.

  4. Place the diced bread in the bottom of a tureen and pour the soup over the bread.

  5. Add a little soy sauce for color.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey bones
Release gelatin and flavor into the broth during the long simmer.
Beef bones
Add deeper savory flavor and body to the broth during the long simmer.
Flour
Thickens the strained broth so it feels fuller in the mouth.
Bread
Soaks up broth in the tureen, adding softness and body to the soup.
Onions
Add aromatic sweetness and savory depth as they cook down in the broth.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the soup. Flour mixed with a little cold water first keeps it from clumping. Stirring it into hot soup while it is still moving and then boiling it lets the starch thicken evenly.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, beef, carrot, turnip, onion, clove, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, beef, carrot, turnip, onion, clove, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipes