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Soup

Another Ox Cheek Soup

A soup of ox cheek, turnips, onions, carrots, celery, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Another Ox Cheek Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ox cheek

  1. Wash the ox cheek and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Stew the pieces in 4-5 quarts of water with turnips, thyme, parsley, black peppercorns, and peas until tender.

  3. Strain the gravy and let it stand overnight.

Finish the soup

  1. Remove the fat and cut the meat from the bones into small pieces.

  2. Stew the meat in the gravy with sliced fried onions, carrots, celery, salt, and cayenne pepper until heated through.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox cheek
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and rich through long stewing.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body to the stewed broth.
Onions
Add savory depth and sweetness when fried before going into the soup.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and color to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Letting the gravy stand overnight. Chilling the strained stock lets the fat rise and solidify on the surface, so it can be removed cleanly. Skipping this step leaves greasy, heavy soup.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, thyme, parsley, onion, carrot, celery, pepper):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, thyme, parsley, onion, carrot, celery, pepper. 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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