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To Make Clear Gravy Soup

A clear soup made from beef, mutton, or game simmered with vegetables, spices, and clarified with egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

To Make Clear Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Add cold water to the meat to allow scum to rise, then remove the scum.

  2. Season the stock with parsley root, a small carrot, onions, mace, and bacon if desired.

  3. Boil the stock for at least 1.5 hours until the meat is tender, then strain the broth.

Make the vegetable flavouring

  1. Fry the carrots and turnips.

  2. Fry the onions without burning them.

  3. Stew the fried vegetables with pepper, salt, cloves, and celery, then strain the mixture.

Clarify and serve

  1. When the broth is cold, skim off the fat and boil it again with egg whites to clarify.

  2. Strain the clarified broth through a cloth; it is ready to use.

  3. Soak the rasped roll in the gravy and garnish with almonds, or add vermicelli or small-shaped macaroni.

  4. For variety, add thinly cut carrots or tender asparagus heads.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Gives the broth its body and flavour as it simmers down.
Egg whites
Coagulate during boiling and trap particles, clearing the cloudy broth.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aroma to the stock and vegetable flavouring.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour to the stock and the fried vegetable base.
Rasped roll
Soaks up the gravy and thickens the soup slightly, giving it a softer body.

The step that matters

Clarifying the broth with egg whites. The broth must be fully cold and fat skimmed first, then brought to a boil gently with the whites. Egg whites set and carry suspended particles to the surface, so the soup clears. Stirring or boiling too hard breaks up the raft and leaves it cloudy.

Swap the carrot

The recipe marks carrot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, turnip, onion, celery, pepper, clove, egg):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Carrotthe original
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Lettucefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, turnip, onion, celery, pepper, clove, 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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