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Wrexham Soup

A hearty beef or mutton soup with carrots, turnip, onions, tomatoes, celery, parsley, cloves, and sweet herb, simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Wrexham Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Tie the parsley, celery, cloves, pepper, and sweet herb together.

  2. In a jar, layer the meat, carrots, turnip, onions, tomatoes, and the tied herbs.

  3. Mix the salt, sugar, and pepper in a small bowl and sprinkle over the layers.

  4. Add 2 quarts of cold water to the jar.

Bake

  1. Seal the jar with a paste cover and bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 5 hours.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef or mutton
Provides the meat and savoury flavour that becomes tender during long, slow cooking.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften and release their sugars in the slow bake.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and moisture, giving the soup its body and tangy flavour.
Turnip
Adds earthy flavour and body as it softens in the broth.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and colour to the broth.

The step that matters

Sealing the jar with a paste cover. A tight seal traps steam and keeps the liquid from evaporating during the five-hour bake, so the meat stays moist and the broth concentrates gently rather than drying out.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, parsley, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, parsley, sugar. 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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