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Beef Soup

A hearty soup made with celery, cabbage, carrots, turnips, onions, beef stock, and soy sauce.

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.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix flour with water, season the mixture with salt and pepper, and stir it into the soup 30 minutes before serving.

  2. Add soy sauce to the tureen, pour the soup over the soy sauce, and stir the soup.

  3. 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 broth as it cooks, giving it a fuller body.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body as they soften during the long simmer.
Onions
Add savory depth and aroma to the broth as they cook down.
Beef stock
Provides the main meaty flavor base for the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the soup. Flour mixed only with water can clump if added straight in. Stirring it in well and letting the soup simmer thickens it evenly, without lumps or a raw 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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