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Matso Soup

A hearty beef broth with matso flour balls, simmered with vegetables and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Matso Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the shin of beef, gravy beef, and calf's foot in water with celery, carrots, turnips, pepper, salt, and sweet herbs for 8 hours.

  2. Strain the soup and let it cool, then remove the fat.

  3. Return the soup to the pot and warm it up.

Make the matso balls

  1. In a bowl, mix matso flour, chopped suet, pepper, salt, ginger, and nutmeg.

  2. Add the beaten eggs to the mixture and form into large balls.

  3. Brown the shredded onion in oil and add it to the mixture.

Serve

  1. Ten minutes before serving, add the matso balls to the soup.

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. Celery + carrottop 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. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + gingertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,377 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Matso flour
Forms the body of the dumplings and holds them together as they cook.
Eggs
Bind the flour and suet into a cohesive dough that firms when cooked.
Chopped suet
Adds fat that keeps the matso balls tender and rich in texture.
Shin of beef
Releases gelatin and flavour into the broth during long simmering.
Shredded onion
Browning in oil adds savoury, sweet aroma to the matso balls.

The step that matters

Removing the fat after straining. Chilling the strained broth lets the fat solidify on top so it can be lifted off. Leaving too much fat makes the soup greasy and dulls its flavour.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, celery, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour, nutmeg. 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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