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Ordinary Rule for Meat Soup

A hearty beef and bone soup made by simmering beef, bones, and optional vegetables in water, then seasoning with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Ordinary Rule for Meat Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Place the beef and broken bones in a large pot with 1 gallon of cold water.

  2. Slowly bring to a boil over low heat, then simmer for 3 to 4 hours until the liquid reduces by half.

  3. Add 2 teaspoons of coarse sea salt.

  4. Strain the stock.

  5. Cool the stock in a covered earthenware dish.

  6. Once cooled, remove the fat from the top of the stock.

Make the soup

  1. Take 1 quart of the stock.

  2. Add 1 quart of boiling water.

  3. Add any desired vegetables.

  4. Boil for 3 hours.

  5. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Carrot + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together870 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef and broken bones
Release gelatin and flavor into the water during long simmering, giving the stock body.
Vegetables of your choice
Add flavor and sweetness to the broth as they cook.

The step that matters

Slowly bring to a boil over low heat, then simmer. Gentle heat keeps the stock clear and lets collagen and flavor slowly come out of the bones. A hard, rapid boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and can make the stock cloudy and greasy.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, sugar, celery, carrot, spinach):

  1. Cuminfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, celery, carrot, spinach. 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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