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Bone Soup

Bone soup made by simmering bones, meat, vegetables, and seasonings for hours, then strained and thickened with ground rice or sago.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Bone Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Chop the bones and remove any fat.

  2. Melt the butter in a large pot and fry the bones, meat, and onions until browned.

Simmer

  1. Add the water and bring to a simmer.

  2. Add the turnip, carrot, celery, peppercorns, and bouquet garni.

  3. Simmer for four hours, skimming regularly.

Strain and thicken

  1. Strain the soup and return it to the pot.

  2. Stir in the ground rice or sago and cook for an additional fifteen minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Bones
Release gelatin and flavour into the water during long simmering, giving the soup body.
Butter
Fat that carries browning flavour from the fried bones and onions into the broth.
Onions
Browning when fried adds sweet, savoury depth to the finished broth.
Ground rice or sago
Starch that swells on cooking and thickens the strained soup.

The step that matters

Skimming during the four-hour simmer. Fat and foam rise to the surface as the bones cook. Skimming them regularly keeps the broth clean and prevents greasy, cloudy soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, rice):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, rice. 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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