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Broth or Stock

A clear broth made by simmering meat, bones, and water with flour and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Beef and chicken match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,148 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Broth or Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the bones and place them in a pot with the meat and cold water.

  2. Wipe the cooked meat with a little flour and coarse sea salt before adding it to the pot.

Cook and serve

  1. Simmer the mixture gently to create a clear broth.

  2. Serve the broth hot in a heated tureen.

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 + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  2. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef, mutton, or veal
Provides the main flavor and body of the broth as it simmers.
Chicken trimmings
Adds additional savory flavor and richness to the broth.
Cold water
Acts as the cooking liquid that extracts flavor from the meat and bones.

The step that matters

Simmer the mixture gently. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a rolling boil helps keep the broth clear, because vigorous boiling breaks up fat and proteins into the liquid, making it cloudy.

“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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