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Beef Soup

A hearty soup made from a bone with meat, water, vegetables, salt, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Crack the bone in 2 or 3 places to release the marrow.

  2. Cover the bone with 3 to 4 quarts of water and boil slowly for 4 hours, skimming regularly.

  3. Let the soup sit overnight.

Finish and serve

  1. Two hours before serving, skim off the fat and carefully pour off the sediment.

  2. Add desired vegetables, season with coarse sea salt, and thicken with flour and butter mixed together.

  3. Strain out the meat and thick vegetable pieces if preferred 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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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 soup as it cooks with the butter, giving it a fuller body.
Butter
Mixed with flour to form a roux-style paste that thickens the broth smoothly and adds richness.
Bone with meat attached
Releases marrow and collagen into the water, adding body and savory beef flavor to the broth.
Vegetables
Add flavor, sweetness, and texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour and butter. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps and stays grainy. Mixing it with butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper, parsley, carrot, onion, flour, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, parsley, carrot, onion, flour, butter. 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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