Skip to main content
Main

Plain Economical Soup

A simple broth made from beef bone, turkey or chicken, vegetables, and flour thickener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Plain Economical Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the beef bone, beef steak, and turkey or chicken rack in a pot with water.

  2. Add the chopped carrots, turnips, onion, cloves, pepper, and salt.

Simmer and strain

  1. Boil gently for 4 hours.

  2. Strain the soup through a colander, mashing the vegetables to pass through.

  3. Skim off the fat and return the soup to the pot.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the flour with water.

  2. Stir the flour mixture into the soup.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Serve with triangular bits of dry toast.

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

Beef bone
Releases gelatin and savory flavor into the broth during long simmering.
Turkey or chicken
Adds meaty flavor and body to the broth as it simmers.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body when mashed through the strainer.
Turnips
Add earthy flavor and body when mashed through the strainer.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it boils, giving it a fuller texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the soup. Flour clumps if added dry or unmixed, so it must be blended with water first and stirred in well, then boiled so the starch thickens evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes