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Clear Soup Served with Marrow Balls

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Clear Soup Served with Marrow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut beef and ham into small pieces.

  2. Boil with bone in 6 quarts of water for about 3 hours.

  3. Add 1 cup cold water and skim the surface.

  4. Add turnip, carrots, onion, and pepper; boil for another 3 hours.

  5. Strain the soup and set aside until the next day.

  6. Remove the fat and carefully pour off the clear soup from the dregs.

  7. Strain through a flannel cloth dipped in ice water.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, parsley, turnip, carrot, ham, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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