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Beef Soup

A hearty beef soup with barley, carrots, onions, and turnips, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Simmer the soup meat in a large pot for 2 hours.

  2. Remove the meat and add the barley, carrots, onions, and turnips.

  3. Boil the soup for 1 hour.

  4. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, cloves, and spices.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix flour and water to a syrup‑like consistency and stir in to thicken the soup.

  2. Boil for an additional 10 minutes before serving.

  3. Keep the beef hot until ready to serve.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

Barley
Swells as it cooks, adding body and a chewy texture to the broth.
Carrots
Add sweetness and color, and hold their shape through long simmering.
Flour
Thickens the broth as its starch swells with heat, giving it body.
Soup meat
Releases gelatin and flavor into the broth, especially from bone.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour and water mixture. Flour added to hot liquid can clump if not first mixed smooth with water. Thorough stirring and a short boil let the starch swell evenly and fully thicken the soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, barley, carrot, turnip, pepper, clove, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, barley, carrot, turnip, pepper, clove, 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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