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Iced Bouillon

A chilled beef broth made with Armour's Extract of Beef, vegetables, herbs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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 ↓

Iced Bouillon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the bouillon

  1. In a large pot, bring 2 quarts of hot water to a boil.

  2. Add 3 teaspoons of Armour's Extract of Beef, the diced vegetables, parsley, salt, bay leaf, whole pepper, and butter.

  3. Cook for 30 minutes.

Chill and serve

  1. Strain the mixture and chill it.

  2. Serve cold.

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. Parsley + carrottop 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. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Armour's extract of beef
Provides the concentrated beef flavor that gives the bouillon its character.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded, savoury richness to the broth.
Diced carrots
Contribute gentle sweetness and aromatic depth as they simmer.
Diced onions
Release sugars and aromatic compounds that deepen the broth's savoury flavor.
Diced celery
Adds herbal, aromatic notes to the simmering liquid.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, parsley, pepper, butter, carrot, celery. 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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