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Scotch Gravy Soup

A hearty soup made from neck or clod of meat, carrots, turnips, and herbs simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Scotch Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Wash the meat thoroughly to remove blood and hang it to air out.

  2. Cut the meat into pieces.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, add chopped carrots, turnips, and sweet herbs.

  2. Add the meat pieces to the stewpan.

  3. Let the meat sweat and prick it with a knife.

  4. Add well-bruised bones to the stewpan.

  5. Fill the stewpan with water, using 1 quart of water per pound of meat.

  6. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  7. Skim off any foam.

  8. Reduce heat.

  9. Let it simmer for at least 5 hours.

  10. Tie spices in a muslin bag.

  11. Add the muslin bag of spices to the pot.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup with celery, farce-balls, fried bread, or dry toast.

  2. If using cooked cow-heel, cut it into pieces.

  3. Simmer the cow-heel pieces in reduced stock and ketchup.

  4. Add the cow-heel mixture to the soup just 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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Celery + ketchuptop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Neck or clod of meat
Provides the main flavour and body of the stock as it simmers.
Water
Extracts flavour and gelatin from the meat and bones to form the broth.
Carrots
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the simmering stock.
Turnips
Contribute mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Skim off any foam. Foam carries coagulated proteins and impurities that can cloud the broth and taint its flavour if left in the pot.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, carrot, celery, bread, ketchup):

  1. Turnipthe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Tomatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, carrot, celery, bread, ketchup. 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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