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Soup

A Clear Broth to Keep

A clear broth made by cooking beef, veal and mutton shanks in water, to be stored in a cool place.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Beef and mutton are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Clear Broth to Keep

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the beef, veal and mutton shanks in a pan and cover with water.

Cook

  1. Seal with a paste.

  2. Cook until the beef is tender.

Store

  1. Store in a cool place.

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. Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Veal + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Lean meat that cooks tender and adds savoury meaty flavour to the broth.
Veal knuckle
Connective tissue breaks down into gelatin, giving the broth body and a silky mouthfeel.
Mutton shanks
Connective tissue breaks down into gelatin, adding body and richness to the broth.

“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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