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Cheap Soup

A hearty soup made with dripping, diced meat, onions, turnips, leeks, celery, rice or barley, salt, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cheap Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the dripping in a large stewpan over medium heat.

  2. Add the meat, sliced onions, and brown sugar and stir until lightly browned.

  3. Add the turnips, celery, and leeks and stir for 10 minutes.

  4. Pour in 1 quart of cold water and add the rice, then heat until warm.

  5. Add 5 quarts of hot water and stir.

  6. Simmer for 3 hours.

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Leek + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Provides savoury flavour and body as it browns and releases juices into the broth.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding depth to the broth.
Rice
Releases starch during simmering, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and substance, becoming tender during the long simmer.
Brown sugar
Helps the meat and onions brown, adding colour and a caramel note.

The step that matters

Browning the meat, onions and sugar. Stirring until lightly browned builds deeper flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. Pale, under-browned ingredients produce a flatter-tasting broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, turnip, leek, celery, rice, sugar):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, turnip, leek, celery, rice, sugar. 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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