Skip to main content
Main

Gravy Soup

A hearty soup made from a beef leg, water, herbs, onions, spices, and root vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and soak the leg of beef.

  2. Crack the bone and place it in a pot with water, sweet herbs, sliced and fried onions, mace, cloves, allspice, and black peppercorns.

Make the soup

  1. Stew until the soup reaches your desired richness, then remove the meat.

  2. Remove the layer of fat for basting or pie crust the next day.

  3. Cut carrots, turnips, and celery into small pieces and simmer until tender.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of beef
Provides meat and bone that release flavor and body into the broth during slow stewing.
Water
Forms the liquid base that extracts flavor from the meat, bones, and spices.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth to the broth as they cook down.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body as they soften in the broth.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and texture as they become tender in the soup.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savory flavor to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Stew until the soup reaches your desired richness. Simmering gently over a long period lets collagen and marrow from the bone dissolve into the liquid, giving body. Boiling hard can cloud the broth and make it greasy, so keep the liquid at a slow simmer.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, clove, allspice, carrot, turnip, celery):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, clove, allspice, carrot, turnip, celery. 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.

More beef soup recipes

Clear 34Brown 23Quick 12French 6Barley 5Economical 4 See all 245 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes