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Veal Soup

A hearty soup made with veal, ham or bacon, vegetables, and optional dumplings or grains.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Veal Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Wash the veal.

  2. Break up the bones.

  3. Put the veal and ham or bacon into a pot and cover with water.

  4. Add the calf's feet if using.

  5. Stew slowly until the meat falls apart.

  6. Strain the broth.

  7. Return the broth to the pot.

Add vegetables and finish

  1. Add celery, onions, marjoram, carrot, turnip, peppercorns, and salt.

  2. Add small dumplings made of flour and butter.

  3. Simmer for another hour until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Optionally, thicken with noodles, vermicelli, rice, barley, green peas, or asparagus tops 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.

  1. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Marjoram + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Marjoram + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together367 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

Veal knuckle or leg
Breaks down during stewing to give the broth body and rich meaty flavor.
Ham or bacon
Adds smoky, savory flavor and fat that enriches the broth.
Calf's feet
Adds gelatin, which gives the broth a fuller, silkier body.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and aromatic depth as they soften in the broth.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savory background flavor and vegetable body to the soup.
Flour and butter dumplings
Absorb broth and add soft, starchy body and richness to the soup.

The step that matters

Stew slowly until the meat falls apart. Gentle, low-heat simmering lets collagen in the bones and connective tissue slowly convert to gelatin. Boiling hard toughens the meat and leaves the broth cloudy and thin.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, meat, celery, marjoram, carrot, turnip):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, meat, celery, marjoram, carrot, turnip. 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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