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Beef Soup

A hearty beef soup with turnips, onions, carrots, celery, and sweet herbs, thickened with flour and served with buttered dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley 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 of the shin of beef and boil it in 4 cups of water with 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt for 2 hours.

  2. Skim the soup well, then add the turnips, onions, carrots, celery, and tied sweet herbs.

  3. When the vegetables are tender, remove the meat and strain the soup back into the pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the soup with 1 tablespoon of flour mixed with a little water.

  2. Add chopped parsley, more salt, and pepper to taste.

  3. For dumplings, mix 1 teaspoon of butter with 2 tablespoons of flour and moisten with water or milk.

  4. Drop the dumplings into the boiling soup and let them cook for 5 minutes 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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 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

Shin of beef
Releases flavour and body into the broth as it simmers for two hours.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly as the starch swells in the liquid.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and soft texture to the soup as they cook.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aroma to the broth as they soften.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and colour to the soup as they become tender.

The step that matters

Thickening the soup with flour. Flour mixed with water first forms a smooth slurry. Added directly to hot liquid, it clumps, and the starch thickens the soup only once it is fully dispersed and heated.

Swap the onion

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

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

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