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Giblet Soup

A hearty soup made with giblets, vegetables, herbs, and stock, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Giblet Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the giblets thoroughly.

  2. Chop the celery, onion, carrot, and turnip.

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, melt the butter and sauté the chopped vegetables until soft.

  2. Add the giblets, mace, sweet herbs, peppercorns, bay leaf, and stock or water.

  3. Simmer for about 1 hour.

  4. Add the Savoy cabbage and lemon juice, and cook for an additional 20 minutes.

  5. Thicken the soup with flour mixed in a little water, and add browning for color.

  6. Season with salt to taste and serve hot.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Giblets
Provide the main meaty flavour as they simmer into the stock.
Flour
Thickens the soup so it becomes body-rich rather than watery.
Butter
Fat for sautéing the vegetables, carrying flavour into the soup.
Onion
Softened in butter to build a sweet, savoury base for the soup.
Savoy cabbage
Adds bulk and a mild, earthy vegetable flavour near the end of cooking.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury broth.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with flour mixed in a little water. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps; mixing it into cold water first makes a smooth slurry that thickens the soup evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, cabbage, lemon, flour, onion, carrot, turnip):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, cabbage, lemon, flour, onion, carrot, turnip. 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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