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Concord Soup

A hearty beef soup with carrots, turnips, celery, onions, peas, and herbs, simmered for hours and thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 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 ↓

Concord Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. In a large pot, combine the beef, cow heel, carrots, turnips, celery, fresh herbs, browned onions, peas, and water.

  2. Bring to a boil and simmer for several hours.

  3. In a separate pot, sauté an onion in a little butter.

  4. Dredge in a little flour and stir until brown.

Finish the soup

  1. Chop the carrots, onions, turnips, and any remaining meat from the cow heel into 1-inch pieces and add to the stock.

  2. Season with cloves, pepper, and salt, and boil for about 2 hours.

  3. Mix a little flour and butter to form a paste, stir it into the soup, and boil for an additional 10 minutes.

  4. Strain the soup before serving.

  5. If desired, add red wine before serving hot.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef neck
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue, giving the broth body and rich flavour.
Flour
Browned flour and the flour-butter paste thicken the soup and add a toasted, nutty note.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour from the sautéed onion and helps form the thickening paste.
Peas
Starchy vegetable that softens during simmering and thickens the broth slightly.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour stirred until brown needs constant attention, because it can scorch quickly and turn bitter. Evenly coloured flour gives a toasted flavour and colour without burnt notes.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, clove, 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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