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Soup

Cold Beef Bone, Pieces of Steak, Etc

A broth made from beef bones, steak pieces, carrots, turnips, onions, cloves, pepper, salt, optional tomatoes, thickened with flour and served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Beef Bone, Pieces of Steak, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the beef bones and steak pieces in a pot with water.

  2. Add carrots, turnips, onions, cloves, pepper, salt, and tomatoes if using.

  3. Boil gently for 3-4 hours.

  4. Strain the soup back into the pot.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix flour with a little water and stir it into the soup. Boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the pieces of toast just before serving.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Flour
Thickens the broth as it heats, giving it a fuller body.
Beef bones (in the method)
Release gelatin and flavor into the water during long gentle simmering.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the broth as they soften.
Onions
Add savory depth and aroma to the broth as they cook down.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 3-4 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavor and gelatin from the bones without cloudiness. A hard rolling boil can emulsify fat into the broth and make it greasy and murky.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, onion, clove, pepper, flour):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, onion, clove, pepper, 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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