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Beef-Bone Soup

A hearty soup made from beef bones, water, vegetables, spices, and optional tapioca.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and turnip 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 ↓

Beef-Bone Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Place beef bones in a large pot with 5 quarts of water.

  2. Boil gently for about 4 hours.

  3. Add onion, leek, garlic, carrot, turnip, parsnip, cloves, bay leaves, and peppercorns.

  4. Strain the broth and return it to the pot.

Season and finish

  1. Stir in desiccated soup, tarragon vinegar, chervil, chili, and salt to taste.

  2. If desired, add tapioca and cook until thickened.

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. Leek + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Leek + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef bones
Release gelatin and rich flavour into the water during long, gentle simmering.
Tapioca
Thickens the broth as it cooks, giving it a fuller body.

The step that matters

Boil gently for about 4 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavour and gelatin from the bones without clouding the broth. A hard rolling boil emulsifies fat and fragments particles into the liquid, making it cloudy and greasy.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, leek, garlic, carrot, turnip, parsnip):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, leek, garlic, carrot, turnip, parsnip. 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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