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Beef and Cabbage Soup, As in Scotland

A hearty beef soup with cabbage, carrots, turnips, onions, and black pepper, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Beef and Cabbage Soup, As in Scotland

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine the beef and water in a large pot.

  2. Add carrots, turnips, whole onions tied in muslin, and black pepper.

  3. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer slowly for 6 hours until the meat is tender.

Serve

  1. Serve the beef in a soup dish with the soup and vegetables.

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 + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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
Long, slow simmering breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and enriching the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the broth as they soften during the long simmer.
Turnips
Contribute mild sweetness and a soft texture to the broth and vegetables.
Whole onions
Release savory flavor into the broth during simmering; tied in muslin for easy removal.

The step that matters

Simmering slowly for 6 hours. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil lets collagen in the beef break down slowly, yielding tender meat and a clear broth. Boiling hard toughens the meat and clouds the soup.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

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