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Concord Soup

A hearty beef soup with carrots, turnips, celery, onions, peas, and herbs, finished with a roux and optional red wine.

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

Make the stock

  1. In a large pot, combine the beef, cowheel, carrots, turnips, celery, sweet herbs, browned onions, peas, and water.

  2. Boil for several hours, then strain the soup.

  3. Set the strained liquid aside until the next day and remove the fat.

Finish the soup

  1. In the soup pot, fry an onion in a little butter, then stir in flour until browned.

  2. Add the chopped carrots, onions, turnips, and any remaining meat from the cowheel to the stock.

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

  4. Mix a little flour and butter together, stir it into the soup, and boil for an additional 10 minutes.

  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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 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

Neck of beef
Releases flavor and gelatin into the stock during long boiling, giving body.
Cowheel
Adds gelatin, which gives the broth a richer, silkier body.
Flour
Browned and then mixed with butter, it thickens the soup and adds toasty flavor.
Butter
Carries flavor when frying the onion and adds richness to the thickening.
Peas
Break down during boiling, adding body and mild sweetness to the stock.

The step that matters

Removing the fat after the stock has chilled. Fat that stays in the strained stock floats on top and can make the soup greasy. Chilling overnight lets it solidify so it can be lifted off cleanly.

Swap the peas

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

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

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