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Brown or Gravy Soup

A beef soup made by browning meat and bones, simmering for hours, then skimming fat and sieving.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,847 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Brown or Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the beef into pieces and separate it from the bones.

Brown and stew

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and brown the meat and bones, being careful not to burn them.

  2. Once browned, add 1 pint of cold water and salt, then let it stew for 15 minutes.

  3. Add enough water to achieve the desired soup quantity and boil slowly for 4 to 5 hours.

Finish the soup

  1. Allow the soup to cool, then skim off the fat without removing the meat.

  2. Pass the soup through a sieve.

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. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef shin or rump
Provides the meat and collagen that give the soup its body and rich flavor during long simmering.
Butter
Fat that browns the meat and bones, building roasted flavor for the broth.
Cold water
Forms the liquid base in which the beef slowly releases flavor and gelatin.

The step that matters

Browning the meat and bones. Butter heated too hot burns the milk solids and proteins, leaving bitter flavors. Gentle, even browning builds savory depth that carries into the broth.

“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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