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Pork Soup or Jelly

A pork soup made by simmering a leg of pork in water, then served as soup or chilled as jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pork Soup or Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut up and break the bone of the leg of pork.

Make the soup

  1. Simmer it gently in 3 gallons of water until reduced to 1 gallon.

  2. Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Let it stew.

  4. Strain the mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve as soup, 1 cup three times a day.

  2. Eat cold as jelly.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

  3. Pork + nutmegtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,825 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of pork
Provides the meat and bone whose collagen and flavor give the broth its body and gelling quality.
Water
Extracts flavor and gelatin from the pork as it simmers and reduces into the broth.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until reduced. Gentle simmering draws gelatin and flavor from the bone without boiling the broth cloudy or greasy. Reducing to one third of the original volume concentrates the flavor and gives the broth enough gelatin to set when chilled.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper):

  1. Sagefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper. 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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