Name: Beef Soup with Barley
Ingredients: 1 onion, stuck with cloves; 2 stalks of celery, chopped; 1 cup canned tomatoes; 2 turnips, chopped; ¾ cup pearl barley; 4 quarts water; Salt and pepper to taste

Why it works: Turnip and barley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 629 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Soup with Barley

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the meat and crack the bones.
Combine the onion, celery, turnips, tomatoes, and water in a large pot.
Boil gently for 3 hours, reducing the liquid by one-third.
Wash the barley and boil it in a small amount of water for 15 minutes.
Strain the soup, pressing hard to extract all the liquid.
Season the soup, bring it to a boil, and skim off any foam.
Add the barley and the water it was boiled in, then simmer for 30 minutes before serving.

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.

Turnip + barleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together629 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,418 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,377 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, celery, turnip, barley, pepper):

Leekfits better
Carrotfits better
Parsnipfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, celery, turnip, barley, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.