Name: Soup Stock, Made in an Hour
Ingredients: 1 lb beef, mutton, or veal; 1 large carrot, sliced; 1 turnip, sliced; 1 onion, stuck with a clove; 1 piece burnt onion; 1 oz fat bacon, chopped; 1 quart boiling water; 1 pinch salt

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 ↓

Soup Stock, Made in an Hour

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Cut the meat into small slices and place in a stewpan or saucepan.
Add the sliced carrot, turnip, and onion.
Mix everything together and pour in the boiling water.

Simmer and strain

Let it simmer over low heat until it begins to stick to the bottom.
Increase the heat and boil for ½ hour.
Skim off the fat and strain through a sieve or cloth.

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.

Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,873 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,233 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 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

Beef, mutton, or veal: Releases meat flavor and collagen that turns into gelatin, giving the stock body.
Carrot: Adds gentle sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth.
Turnip: Adds mild, slightly sweet flavor to the broth.
Onion: Adds savory aroma, and the burnt onion adds deeper color.
Bacon fat: Adds richness and flavor, most of which is skimmed off at the end.

The step that matters

Simmer gently on low heat before boiling. A gentle simmer lets the meat release flavor and fat slowly and keeps the liquid clear. Boiling hard too early can break fat into tiny droplets that make the stock cloudy and greasy.

Swap the clove

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

Celeryfits better
Parsleyfits better
Thymefits better
Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion. 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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Soup Stock, Made in an Hour