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A Cheap Soup

A hearty barley and beef soup simmered with onions, celery, and turnip.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 145 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Cheap Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the barley in cold water.

  2. In a soup pot, combine the barley and beef with enough cold water to cover.

  3. Bring to a boil, skim off any foam, and add the onions.

Simmer the soup

  1. Reduce heat and simmer gently for 2 hours.

  2. Skim off fat, then add celery and turnip.

  3. Season with salt and boil for another 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Remove the meat and keep warm.

  2. Skim the broth and pour 1 quart into a basin.

  3. In a separate pan, mix flour with the broth gradually, stirring well.

  4. Heat the mixture until it boils, then let it boil briefly.

  5. Serve the meat on a dish and strain the sauce over it.

  6. Add capers, gherkins, or walnuts if desired.

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. Turnip + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Barley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Barley
Thickens the soup as it cooks and gives it a hearty, chewy texture.
Beef shin or leg
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue, enriching the broth with body and savory flavor.
Flour
Stirred into broth and boiled, it thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce.
Onions
Release sweetness and aroma into the broth as they simmer.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the broth. Adding flour gradually while stirring keeps it from forming lumps. Boiling then cooks out the raw starch taste and fully thickens the sauce.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, beef, onion, celery, turnip, flour):

  1. Capersthe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Parsleyfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, beef, onion, celery, turnip, flour. 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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