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Beef Soup

A hearty beef broth with turnips, carrots, celery, onions, herbs, and dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Crack the bone of the shin of beef and place it in a pot with 4 quarts of water and 4 teaspoons of coarse sea salt.

  2. Bring to a boil and let it simmer for 2 hours, skimming off any foam.

  3. Add the turnips, onions, carrots, celery, and tied sweet herbs to the pot.

  4. Once the vegetables are tender, remove the meat and strain the soup back into the pot.

Finish the soup

  1. Thicken the soup with a mixture of flour and water.

  2. Stir in the chopped parsley, and season with more salt and pepper to taste.

Add the dumplings

  1. For the dumplings, mix 2 tablespoons of butter with 4 tablespoons of flour and moisten with a little water or milk.

  2. Drop the dumplings into the boiling soup and let them cook for 5 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.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Shin of beef
Gives the broth its meaty flavour and body as it simmers with the bone.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body to the broth as they cook until tender.
Onions
Add savoury depth and sweetness to the broth as they soften.
Flour
Thickens the soup and forms the base of the dumplings.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the dumplings, keeping them tender.

The step that matters

Drop the dumplings into the boiling soup. The soup must be at a full boil when the dumplings go in so they cook through quickly. Dropping them into a gentle simmer can leave them dense and gummy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, turnip, carrot, celery, flour, parsley, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, turnip, carrot, celery, flour, parsley, 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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