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Spring Dinners

A hearty meat soup with onion, cloves, parsley, mace, dried herb, peppercorns, bay leaf, turnip, carrot, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,445 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Spring Dinners

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the meat with a wet cloth and place it in a soup kettle over a bone.

  2. Pour cold water over the meat, using 1 quart for every pound.

  3. Heat the kettle over the fire and skim off any scum that rises.

  4. Peel the onion and insert the cloves into it.

  5. Wash the parsley and wrap it around the mace, dried herb, peppercorns, and bay leaf, tying it into a bundle.

  6. Wash and peel the turnip and carrot, leaving them whole.

Simmer the soup

  1. Once the soup is clear, add the vegetables and 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt.

  2. Cover the kettle and let it simmer slowly.

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. Parsley + sagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + sagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together731 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Gives the broth its main body and rich savoury flavour as it cooks slowly.
Turnip
Adds a mild, slightly peppery sweetness and body to the finished soup.
Carrot
Contributes natural sweetness and colour to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Skimming the scum as the kettle heats. Scum is coagulated protein and impurities that rise as the broth heats. Removing it early keeps the soup clear and clean-tasting rather than cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, onion, clove, parsley, sage, pepper, turnip):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion, clove, parsley, sage, pepper, 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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