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Beef Soup

A hearty soup of celery, cabbage, carrots, turnips, onions, and beef stock, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine celery, cabbage, carrots, turnips and onions with cold water in a soup pot.

  2. Boil for 2 hours.

  3. Add beef stock and boil for an additional hour.

  4. Mix flour with water, salt and pepper.

  5. Stir the flour mixture into the soup 30 minutes before serving.

Serve

  1. Add soy sauce to the tureen.

  2. Pour the soup into the tureen.

  3. Stir and serve 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. Celery + carrottop 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. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + turniptop 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

Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it a fuller body.
Beef stock
Adds savoury meaty flavour as the base liquid of the soup.
Soy sauce
Adds savoury depth and salty umami to the finished soup.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body as they soften during long simmering.
Onions
Build savoury flavour as they soften and sweeten while simmering.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the soup. Flour mixed with water must be stirred in well and given time to cook, or it can form lumps and taste raw. Adding it 30 minutes before serving lets it thicken fully and lose its starchy taste.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, cabbage, carrot, turnip, beef, flour, 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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