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Cottage Soup

A hearty soup of beef, bacon, potatoes, rice, and vegetables simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cottage Soup

about 5 pints

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the base

  1. Fry the beef, bacon, cabbage, and onions in butter or dripping until browned.

  2. Add 1 gallon of water and bring to a gentle simmer.

  3. Stir in the sliced carrots.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Cook for 3 hours.

  2. Add the turnips and rice towards the end of cooking.

  3. Cook until tender.

  4. Mash the potatoes. Pass the mashed potatoes through a colander.

Season and serve

  1. Season the soup with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Keep the soup covered.

  3. Serve hot, making about 5 pints of excellent soup.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 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

Beef
Provides savoury meaty flavour and substance as it browns and slowly softens in the broth.
Mealy potatoes
Break down when mashed and passed through, thickening the broth and giving it body.
Rice
Absorbs liquid and swells during long simmering, adding body to the soup.
Bacon
Renders fat and smoky, salty flavour into the base during browning.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they brown, building depth of flavour in the base.

The step that matters

Browning the beef, bacon, cabbage, and onions. Browning through Maillard reactions creates deep savoury flavour that water alone cannot produce, so the base should be properly coloured before adding water.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, potato, rice, carrot, turnip, onion, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato, rice, carrot, turnip, onion, butter. 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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