Name: Family Soup
Ingredients: 3 pounds beef or mutton; 2-3 slices ham; vegetables (to taste); 3 quarts water; spices (to taste); coarse sea salt (to taste)

Why it works: Beef and ham are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,729 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Family Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Chop the beef or mutton, ham, and vegetables finely.

Cook and season

Boil in 3 quarts of water for 1.5 hours.
Skim the soup and add salt and spices to taste.

Serve

Strain the soup to serve, or convert it into carrot, turnip, or ground‑rice 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.

Beef + hamtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,729 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef or mutton: Releases flavor and gelatin into the broth during long simmering, giving body to the soup.
Ham: Adds savory, salty depth to the broth as it simmers.
Vegetables: Contribute sweetness and aroma to the broth as they cook down.

“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.