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Gabbure Soup

A hearty vegetable and meat soup made with cabbage, potatoes, leeks, turnip, carrot, onion, haricot beans, and optional beef, bacon, or ham.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gabbure Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Fill a 5-quart stewpan with water and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the cabbage, potatoes, leeks, turnip, carrot, and onion to the boiling water.

  3. Stir in the soaked haricot beans and your choice of meat.

  4. Boil everything together slowly for 1½ hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the meat and serve it separately.

  2. Skim off any fat floating on top of the soup.

  3. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  4. Prepare croutons by cutting bread very thin and baking until light brown.

  5. Serve the soup hot with croutons.

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. Leek + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Leek + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Leek + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Soften during the long simmer and thicken the broth with their starch.
Potatoes
Break down slightly during simmering, adding body and starch to the broth.
Knuckle of beef or veal
Releases collagen and flavor into the broth during the long, slow boil.
Cabbage
Adds bulk and a mild sweetness as it softens in the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Boil everything together slowly for 1½ hours. A gentle simmer lets the beans and meat become tender without breaking the vegetables apart. A hard boil can cloud the broth and toughen the meat, so keep the pot at a slow, steady simmer.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, leek, turnip, carrot, onion, beans, beef):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, leek, turnip, carrot, onion, beans, beef. 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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