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Beef Soup

A hearty beef soup with tomatoes, beans, vegetables, eggs, wine, and fried ham balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 21 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and beans match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. In the morning, boil the piece of beef in 2 gallons of water with the hock of bacon.

  2. At 10 o'clock, add the tomatoes, butter beans, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, sugar, okras, and onions.

  3. After 1 hour, stir in the green corn, salt, and red pepper.

Enrich and finish

  1. To enrich the soup, beat the eggs and mix with some hot soup, then add to the pot before serving.

  2. For extra flavor, stir in the wine and lemon slices just before serving.

Make the meatballs and serve

  1. Chop some of the meat and cold ham, mix with bread crumbs and egg yolk, season with pepper, and fry into balls.

  2. Place the fried balls on top of the soup and serve with toasted bread.

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. Tomato + beanstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Beans + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Tomato + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 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

Eggs
Beaten eggs mixed into hot soup thicken it slightly and enrich its texture.
Beef
Simmering the beef gives the soup its meaty, savory body.
Butter beans
Starchy beans add body and a soft, creamy texture to the soup.
Tomatoes
Tomatoes add acidity and a bright, savory flavor to the broth.
Wine
Wine adds acidity and aroma that brighten the finished soup.
Potatoes
Diced potatoes release starch that gives the soup body and softness.

The step that matters

Stirring the beaten eggs into the soup. Eggs must be tempered with hot soup first, then added to the pot before serving; adding them directly can scramble them into lumps and leave the soup grainy rather than smoothly enriched.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, tomato, butter, beans, potato, carrot, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, tomato, butter, beans, potato, carrot, 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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