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Plain Economical Soup

A hearty soup made with beef bone, meat, vegetables, flour, and served with toast.

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

Make the broth

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

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

  3. Boil gently for 4 hours.

Strain and thicken

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

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

  3. Mix the flour with water and stir it into the soup.

  4. Boil the soup for an additional 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of 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

Flour
Thickens the soup as it boils, giving it a fuller body.
Turnips
Add vegetable body and mild sweetness to the broth, and mash into it when strained.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the broth, and mash into it when strained.
Cold roast beef bone
Releases gelatin and savory flavor into the water during long gentle simmering.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 4 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavor and gelatin slowly while keeping the broth clear. A hard rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and makes the soup cloudy and greasy.

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.

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