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Lamb Soup

A hearty lamb soup with vegetables and optional tomatoes, okra, noodles, dumplings, or rice, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and okra share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lamb Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the neck and breast of lamb.

  2. For each pound of meat, add 4 cups of water and 1 teaspoon of salt.

  3. Boil the meat for 1 hour.

Make the soup

  1. Add the sliced onions, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and sweet herbs to the pot.

  2. If in season, add tomatoes or okras.

  3. Once the vegetables are cooked, remove the meat.

  4. Mix flour with a little water to form a smooth paste and add it to the soup.

  5. Optionally, add noodles, dumplings, or rice to thicken the soup.

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. Turnip + okratop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + okratop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Onion + okratop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the meat and rich flavor that give the broth its body.
Flour
Thickens the broth as it cooks, giving it a fuller texture.
Potatoes
Soften during simmering and add starch that lightly thickens the soup.
Onions
Release sweetness and savory depth into the broth as they cook.

The step that matters

Adding the flour paste. Flour must be mixed smooth with a little water first, then stirred in. Added dry or in lumps, it clumps and does not thicken the soup evenly.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, onion, carrot, turnip, potato, okra, 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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