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Gravy Soup

A soup made from beef bones, neck, vegetables, bread, and red wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and endive share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 75 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gravy Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the beef bones and neck in water to extract flavor.

  2. Strain the broth and set aside.

Make the soup

  1. In a stew pan, brown the butter.

  2. Add the onion, celery, lettuce, chervil, endive, spinach, turnips, and carrots.

  3. Season with pepper, salt, and cloves, then boil together.

  4. Add the slices of dried bread and red wine.

  5. Serve with a toasted French roll in the center.

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. Chervil + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Celery + endivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together160 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef bones and neck
Provide the meaty flavor and body of the broth as they simmer.
Butter
Browns to add richness and a nutty aroma to the vegetables.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the soup.
Turnips and carrots
Add natural sweetness and soft texture as they cook in the broth.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, onion, celery, lettuce, chervil, endive):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, onion, celery, lettuce, chervil, endive. 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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