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Bouillon Soup

A hearty beef broth with vegetables, noodles, rice, or sago.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 286 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bouillon Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Bind the beef into a good shape with tape and place it in a pot with 4 quarts of water.

  2. Heat slowly to a boil, skim off any foam, and reserve 1 pint of the liquid for cooking vegetables.

  3. Add 1 sliced carrot, 1 sliced turnip, the large onion, and the herbs to the pot.

  4. Stew slowly for 4 hours, then remove the beef and keep it warm over boiling water.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the soup, pulping the vegetables, and cool it before skimming off the fat.

  2. Return the soup to the heat, add noodles, boiled rice, or soaked German sago, and simmer for 5 minutes.

  3. Pour the soup into a tureen 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. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beans + cauliflowertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Round beef
Gives the long-simmered broth its rich, meaty flavor and body.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and aroma to the broth as they cook.
Turnips
Contribute mild sweetness and earthy flavor to the broth.
Onion
Adds savory depth and aroma to the broth.

The step that matters

Skimming the foam and fat. Foam that forms as the liquid first boils and fat released during stewing can make the broth cloudy and greasy. Skimming while hot removes the foam, and chilling the soup lets the fat solidify on top so it can be lifted off cleanly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, onion, beans, peas, cauliflower):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, beans, peas, cauliflower. 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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