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Beef and Cabbage Soup

A hearty soup made with beef, bacon, duck, cabbage, carrots, leeks, onions, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef and Cabbage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Prepare a good stock-pot of broth using beef, bacon, and duck.

Make the soup base

  1. Chop the onions.

  2. Fry the onions in butter in a stew-pan.

  3. Mix in the flour. Fry for 5 minutes.

  4. Dilute the mixture with the prepared broth.

  5. Bring to a boil.

  6. Remove from heat and skim the fat.

  7. Let it cook slowly for 1 hour.

Prepare the vegetables and serve

  1. Blanch the cabbages cut into quarters.

  2. Place the cabbages in a stew-pan with bacon fat.

  3. Add young carrots, parsley, and leeks. Braise together.

  4. Drain the vegetables.

  5. Add them to the tureen with the remaining broth.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  5. Parsley + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together759 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth, body-rich base when fried with the onions.
Butter
Fat for frying the onions, carrying their flavour into the soup.
Cabbages
Provide the main bulk and a mild sweet flavour as they soften in the broth.
Bacon
Adds smoky, savoury fat and flavour to the broth and the braising cabbage.

The step that matters

Mixing in the flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot fat for a few minutes before liquid is added; otherwise it stays raw-tasting and can form lumps when diluted.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, butter, flour, carrot, parsley, leek):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, butter, flour, carrot, parsley, leek. 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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