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Amber Soup

A beef and salt pork soup simmered for six hours, clarified with egg whites and broken shells, seasoned with salt, pepper, mace, and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Amber Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meats and onions

  1. Fry the salt pork in a pan until crisp, then remove it.

  2. In the same fat, brown the sliced onions carefully, then take them out.

  3. Add the reserved beef pieces to the pan and fry until brown and crisp.

  4. Combine the pork, beef, onions, and the shin of beef in a soup kettle.

  5. Add the carrots, turnip, celery, and bay leaves.

Simmer and strain

  1. Cover with water and heat gradually, then boil slowly for 6 hours.

  2. Strain the soup and set it aside to cool.

  3. The next day, skim the fat and strain the soup through a coarse cloth back into the kettle.

Clarify and season

  1. Stir in the egg whites and broken shells to clarify the soup, removing scum as it rises.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and a little mace, and add lemon slices if desired.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 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

Beef shin
Gives body and rich meaty flavor to the broth as it simmers for hours.
Beef
Browning builds savory flavor that carries into the broth.
Salt pork
Its rendered fat adds savory richness to the browned base.
Egg whites
Coagulate and trap suspended particles so the broth comes out clear.
Onions
Browning them adds sweetness and depth to the soup's color and flavor.

The step that matters

Clarifying with egg whites and shells. Egg whites and shells must be stirred in cold-to-warm and the soup brought up gently; as proteins set they trap cloudy particles and scum. Stirring too vigorously or boiling hard breaks up the raft and leaves the soup cloudy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

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