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A Cheap Soup

A hearty barley soup made with beef, 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. Combine the barley and beef in a soup pot with enough cold water to cover.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Skim off any foam.

  5. Add the onions.

  6. Reduce heat and simmer gently for 2 hours.

  7. Skim off the fat.

Make the soup

  1. Add the celery and turnip.

  2. Season with salt.

  3. Boil for another 1.5 hours.

  4. Remove the meat.

  5. Keep the meat warm.

  6. Skim the broth.

Thicken and serve

  1. Pour 1 quart of broth into a basin.

  2. Mix the flour with the broth gradually in a separate pan, stirring well.

  3. Heat the mixture until it boils. Let it boil briefly.

  4. Serve the meat on a dish.

  5. Strain the sauce over the meat.

  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 broth and adds chewy body as it cooks down.
Beef shin or leg
Releases collagen and flavour into the broth, becoming tender during long simmering.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth sauce when stirred in and boiled.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth during simmering.
Celery
Contributes savoury, aromatic flavour to the broth.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and soft texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into the broth. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps instead of dispersing. Whisking it gradually into cold or warm broth first keeps the sauce smooth before it is heated to a boil and thickened.

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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