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Meat Soups

A beef stock made by simmering beef, onions, carrot, turnip, cloves, and salt in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Meat Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the base

  1. Cover the bottom of a stewpan with sliced onions.

  2. Layer the beef on top, adding the chopped bone, carrot, turnip, and cloves.

  3. Set the stewpan over gentle heat for 10 minutes, shaking occasionally to prevent burning.

  4. Reduce heat to low and cook for over an hour until a blackish glaze forms at the bottom.

Simmer and strain

  1. Fill the stewpan with cold water and add salt.

  2. When boiling, reduce to a simmer for about an hour, skimming off fat and scum.

  3. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve into a basin and set aside for future use.

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 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

Beef
Supplies the meaty flavor and body that the stock carries once simmered.
Onions
Slow cooking caramelizes their sugars, adding sweetness and deep color to the stock.

The step that matters

Reduce heat to low and cook until a blackish glaze forms at the bottom. Slow browning of the sugars and proteins builds color and roasted flavor. If the heat is too high or the pan is left unattended, the glaze scorches and turns bitter, spoiling the stock.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, beef, carrot, turnip):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, beef, carrot, turnip. 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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