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Minute Soup

A hearty beef and veal soup with vegetables, herbs, and poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 ↓

Minute Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the beef, veal, and lard together.

  2. Add the onion, turnip, carrot, celery, and parsley, and chop everything together.

  3. Place the mixture in a kettle with 3 quarts of water, salt, cloves, and bay leaf.

Make the broth

  1. Bring to a boil and skim the surface for 30 minutes, checking seasoning.

  2. Strain the soup through a sieve or cloth.

  3. Serve the broth over slices of bread, rice, or vermicelli boiled separately.

Make the hash and serve

  1. For the hash, use the remaining solids, make a gravy with pot grease and flour, and soften with some broth.

  2. Add a thinly sliced onion and fine herbs, season, and stir in the hash.

  3. Boil for a few minutes over high heat and serve topped with poached eggs.

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

Beef
Provides rich meaty flavor and body to the broth as it simmers.
Veal
Adds gelatin from the bones and meat, giving the broth a fuller body.
Lard
Carries fat flavor through the broth and forms the grease used in the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the pot grease into a gravy that binds the hash.

The step that matters

Skimming the surface while the broth boils. Skimming removes coagulated proteins and excess fat that would otherwise cloud the broth and make it greasy.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, onion, turnip, carrot, celery, parsley. 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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