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Beef Soup

A hearty soup made with a shin bone, vegetables, and flour thickener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Crack the shin bone well.

  2. Place the cracked bone in cold water.

  3. Cook slowly for 2 hours.

  4. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  5. Boil slowly for 1 hour.

Add the vegetables

  1. Add the diced carrot, turnip, and celery.

  2. After 20 minutes, add the sliced onion and potatoes.

  3. Wait 20 minutes.

  4. Add the chopped tomato and the flour mixed smooth with cold water.

  5. Add the shredded parsley.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the meat and bones from the soup.

  2. Cut part of the meat into dice.

  3. Return the diced meat to the soup.

  4. Cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  5. Remove from heat and 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 + 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. Carrot + turniptop 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Shin bone
Releases collagen and flavor into the water as it cooks slowly, giving the soup body.
Potatoes
Starchy vegetable that softens during cooking and thickens the soup slightly as it breaks down.
Flour
Mixed with cold water first, it thickens the broth as it heats without forming lumps.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour must be mixed smooth with cold water before it goes into the hot soup, because dry flour added directly clumps and forms lumps that do not dissolve evenly.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, onion, parsley, potato, pepper. 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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