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Veal Soup

A clear soup made with veal knuckle, vegetables, and herbs, thickened with flour and served with dumplings or noodles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley 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 ↓

Veal Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine the knuckle of veal and 4 quarts of water in a pot. Add 4 teaspoons of coarse sea salt.

  2. Boil the veal for 1 hour.

  3. Add the sliced onions, turnips, carrots, sweet herbs, and celery to the pot.

  4. Once the vegetables are tender, strain the soup.

Thicken and flavour

  1. Return the soup to the pot and thicken it with flour mixed smoothly with a little water.

  2. Stir in finely chopped parsley.

Add dumplings and serve

  1. For dumplings, mix 2 teaspoons of butter with 2 tablespoons of flour and enough milk or water to make a very soft dough.

  2. Drop the dumplings into the boiling soup, making them about the size of a hickory nut.

  3. If using noodles, add them to the soup and boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Serve the meat with the vegetables around it, and offer drawn butter or any meat sauce on the side.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

Veal knuckle
Releases gelatin and savoury flavour into the water as it simmers, giving the broth body.
Flour
Thickens the strained soup as its starch swells with heat, giving it a lightly body texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the dumpling dough, keeping the dumplings tender.
Turnips
Contribute sweetness and body to the broth as they cook until tender.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold water first, then stirred into the hot soup. Added dry or lumpy, the starch clumps and cannot thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, turnip, carrot, celery, flour, butter, parsley. 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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