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Ordinary Rule for Meat Soup

A simple meat soup made by boiling meat and bone with water, parsley, celery, carrot, burnt sugar, and spinach.

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

  1. Combine 1 quart of cold water with 1 pound of meat and bone in a pot.

  2. Bring to a boil, adding boiling water from a kettle if the liquid evaporates.

Color and serve

  1. Add pounded parsley, celery, or grated carrot a few moments before serving for color.

  2. For additional color, use burnt sugar or pounded spinach.

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

Meat and bone
Provides the main flavor and body of the broth as it simmers in water.
Parsley
Adds a fresh herbal aroma and bright green color when added near the end.
Celery
Contributes a mild savory aroma and a fresh green tint when added near the end.
Grated carrot
Adds a little natural sweetness and orange color to the finished soup.
Spinach
Adds green color to the soup when pounded and used for coloring.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil and top up the liquid. Keeping the pot's liquid level steady with boiling water helps the meat and bone stay submerged and cook evenly, while a rolling boil can cloud the broth. Adding cold water instead would cool the pot and slow the extraction of flavor.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, parsley, celery, carrot, sugar):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, parsley, celery, carrot, sugar. 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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