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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, onions, and cold water in a soup pot.

  2. Boil for 2 hours.

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

  4. Mix the flour with the water, adding salt and pepper.

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

Serve

  1. Place the India Boy in the tureen.

  2. Pour the soup over it.

  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 a rich, savoury beef base to the soup.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften in the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the soup. Flour mixed with water must be fully dispersed before it goes into the hot soup, or it will clump. Adding it 30 minutes before serving gives the starch time to cook and thicken smoothly, removing any raw flour 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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