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Beef Soup

A hearty soup made with leftover beef, vegetables, barley, and a roux of butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Cut the leftover beef into small dice.

  2. Lightly roast the diced beef in butter.

  3. In a saucepan, combine sliced onions, carrots, turnip, and butter or drippings. Brown the mixture thoroughly.

  4. Add flour and mix well.

Make the soup

  1. Boil 2½ quarts of beef stock.

  2. Add the boiled stock to the saucepan mixture.

  3. Add bay leaf, salt, pepper, and celery.

  4. Let the soup boil for 2 hours.

Add the barley and serve

  1. Boil barley in several waters until well done. Strain the boiled barley.

  2. Mix the strained soup with the beef and barley.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the stock and browned vegetables into a body-rich soup.
Butter or drippings
Carries flavor and browns the vegetables and beef, adding richness.
Barley
Adds chewy texture and body as it cooks into the broth.
Beef stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor of the whole soup.
Onions
Browning gives sweetness and depth to the soup base.

The step that matters

Brown the mixture thoroughly. Browning the onions, carrots and turnip builds deep, roasted flavor through the Maillard reaction. Pale vegetables leave the soup tasting flat.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, pepper, celery. 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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