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A Cheap Soup

A hearty barley soup with beef, onions, celery, and turnip, finished with a flour-thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 145 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Cheap Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Simmer the soup

  1. Wash the barley in cold water.

  2. In a soup pot, combine the barley and beef with enough cold water to cover.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Skim off any foam.

  5. Add the onions.

  6. Reduce heat and simmer gently for 2 hours.

  7. Skim off the fat.

  8. Add the celery and turnip.

  9. Season with salt.

  10. Boil for an additional 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the meat.

  2. Keep the meat warm.

  3. Skim the broth.

  4. Pour 1 quart into a basin.

  5. In a separate pan, mix the flour with the broth gradually, stirring well.

  6. Heat the mixture until it boils and let it boil briefly.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat on a dish.

  2. Strain the sauce over the meat.

  3. Add capers, gherkins, or walnuts if desired.

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. Turnip + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Barley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley
Releases starch as it cooks, giving the soup body and a slightly thickened texture.
Beef shin or leg
Its connective tissue breaks down into gelatin, enriching the broth and making the meat tender.
Onions
Their sugars and aromatics mellow during long simmering, sweetening and deepening the broth.
Flour
Its starch thickens the broth into a smooth sauce once it is heated and boiled.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the broth. Stir the flour into the broth gradually so it disperses without lumps. Boiling briefly cooks the starch, thickening the sauce and removing the raw floury taste.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, beef, onion, celery, turnip, flour):

  1. Capersthe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Parsleyfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, beef, onion, celery, turnip, flour. 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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