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Amber Soup

A beef and veal broth thickened with egg whites, simmered with onion, carrot, celery, bay leaf, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Amber Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Melt the butter in a soup kettle and sauté the sliced onion until dark brown.

  2. Add the beef and veal, cover, and cook for 10 minutes until juices ooze from the meat.

  3. Pour in 2 quarts of cold water, cover, and let the soup simmer gently for 3 hours.

  4. Add the carrot, bay leaf, celery, and cloves, and simmer for 1 more hour.

  5. Strain the soup through a colander and return it to the kettle.

Clarify and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites with ½ cup of cold water until well mixed.

  2. Add the egg mixture to the boiling soup, cover, and boil rapidly for 2 minutes.

  3. Set aside for a moment, then strain the soup through two layers of cheesecloth before serving.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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
Releases juices and flavor into the broth as it simmers slowly.
Lean veal
Adds gelatin and body to the broth during long, gentle simmering.
Egg whites
Coagulate and trap fine particles, clarifying the soup into a clear amber broth.
Onion
Browning in butter deepens the color and flavor of the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the boiling soup. The egg whites must be added to the soup and boiled to set; they then rise and trap cloudy particles. Boiling too gently, or stirring them in unevenly, leaves the broth murky.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, butter, onion, carrot, celery, egg. 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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