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Gravy Soup

A hearty beef soup with flour, butter, onions, carrots, turnips, tomatoes, eggs, mace, cloves, claret, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and vegetables

  1. Boil the soup meat until tender.

  2. Chop the soup meat finely.

  3. Chop the onions.

  4. Chop the carrots, turnips, and tomatoes finely.

Make the soup

  1. Brown the flour with the butter in a pan.

  2. Add the onions to the pan with the meat and enough pot liquor or water to moisten, then fry for 10 minutes.

  3. Return the mixture to the soup pot.

  4. Add the chopped carrots, turnips, and tomatoes to the soup.

  5. Hard boil the eggs.

  6. Add the eggs to the soup along with the mace and cloves.

  7. Let the soup rest for 15 minutes before serving.

  8. Stir in the claret.

Serve

  1. Serve with rice.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Soup meat
Provides the main body and savory flavor of the soup once boiled and finely chopped.
Flour
Browned with butter to thicken the soup and add a nutty, toasted flavor.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, building savory depth in the base.
Claret
Adds acidity and wine flavor to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Brown the flour with the butter. Cooking the flour in fat until it turns golden develops a toasted, nutty flavor and helps it thicken the soup smoothly. Burnt flour turns bitter, and raw flour leaves a pasty taste.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, beef, flour, butter, onion, carrot, turnip):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, beef, flour, butter, onion, carrot, turnip. 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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