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Beef Soup

A hearty beef soup with vegetables, potatoes, and dumplings, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Marjoram and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,225 recipes. Both carry terpineol, which smells pine, woody. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Crack the bone of the shin of beef and remove the tough outer skin.

  2. Wash the beef and place it in a kettle with water and salt.

  3. Boil for about 4 hours until perfectly tender.

  4. Remove the beef and adjust the seasoning of the liquid with more salt if necessary.

Make the soup

  1. Add vegetables, scorched sugar, marjoram, thyme, and red pepper to the liquid.

  2. Thicken the soup with flour moistened with water until it reaches a cream-like consistency, stirring while boiling.

  3. About 45 minutes before serving, add the quartered potatoes.

  4. Make small dumplings with flour, butter, salt, and enough water to form a dough.

  5. Add the dumplings to the soup and boil for 10 minutes.

  6. Just before serving, stir in a little parsley.

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. Marjoram + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  2. Marjoram + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Thyme + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Marjoram + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the soup into a creamy consistency as its starch swells in the boiling liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the dumplings.
Potatoes
Add body and starch, softening and partly thickening the broth as they cook.
Shin of beef
Long boiling breaks down its connective tissue, enriching the broth with flavour and gelatin.

The step that matters

Boil the beef until perfectly tender. Shin is tough connective tissue that needs a long, gentle simmer to break down into tender meat and a richer, gelatin-laden broth. Cutting the boil short leaves the meat chewy.

Swap the marjoram

The recipe marks marjoram as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, sugar, thyme, pepper, potato, flour, butter):

  1. Marjoramthe original
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Rosemaryfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, thyme, pepper, potato, flour, butter. 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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