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Consomme a LA Royale

A clear beef consommé made with finely scraped lean beef, carrots, turnip, onion, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Consomme a LA Royale

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape or chop the beef very fine.

  2. Clean the vegetables and cut them into small pieces.

  3. Remove all the fat from the stock and place it in a stewpan.

  4. Add the scraped meat and vegetables to the stewpan.

Clarify the soup

  1. Stir over the heat until nearly boiling.

  2. Remove the spoon and let the soup boil well until clear.

  3. Fix a cloth onto a soup-stand.

  4. Pour boiling water through the cloth to warm it.

  5. Pour the soup onto the cloth.

  6. Let the soup run through the cloth twice.

Serve

  1. Warm the soup again.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  5. Beef + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 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
Being scraped fine and simmered, it gathers into a raft that clarifies the stock.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the consommé, carrying all the flavour.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and aroma to the clarified broth.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and aroma to the clarified broth.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Let the soup boil well until clear. Boiling must be gentle enough to avoid breaking up the meat raft, which traps cloudy particles. If the soup is stirred or boiled too vigorously, the raft breaks and the consommé stays cloudy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip. 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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