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Dinner Soup

A hearty beef soup with marrow, tomatoes, ham, and vegetables simmered for hours.

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 ↓

Dinner Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the beef and cut it into 1-inch cubes.

  2. In a kettle, combine half of the beef, marrow bone, cold water, and tomatoes.

  3. Brown the remaining beef in a hot frying pan with some marrow from the bone, then add it to the kettle.

Simmer and strain

  1. Heat slowly to boiling, then cook just below boiling for 5 hours.

  2. In a separate pan, cook the ham, carrot, onion, and celery in butter for 5 minutes.

  3. Add this mixture to the soup along with peppercorns, salt, parsley, and bay leaf.

  4. Cook for an additional 30 minutes, then strain the soup.

  5. Cool quickly, remove the fat, and serve.

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

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

  4. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the meat for the soup and, when browned, adds savory flavor.
Marrow bone
Releases fat and gelatin into the broth, adding body and richness during long simmering.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and a tangy flavor that balances the rich beef broth.
Butter
Carries the flavor of the ham and vegetables and adds richness when cooked.
Carrot, onion, and celery
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth as they soften in butter.

The step that matters

Heat slowly to boiling, then cook just below boiling. Keeping the liquid just below a boil prevents cloudiness and keeps the broth clear, while a gentle simmer over 5 hours extracts flavor from the beef and bone without toughening the meat.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, ham, carrot, onion, celery, parsley):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, ham, carrot, onion, celery, 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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