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Good and Cheap Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with beef, peas, and thickened with flour, flavored with mushroom or walnut catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Good and Cheap Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Chop the tops, peelings, and shells of the vegetables into small pieces.

  2. Brown them in a frying pan with the dripping.

  3. Transfer the browned vegetables and dripping to a large pot.

  4. Add the strained liquor collected over the past few days to the pot.

  5. Add the meat and stew gently until tender, but not falling apart.

Finish the soup

  1. About 30 minutes before serving, strain the liquor, pressing the vegetables through a sieve.

  2. Return the strained liquor to the pot and add the peas.

  3. Stew for another 30 minutes, or longer if the peas are very old.

  4. Skim off any scum and remove excess fat before serving.

  5. Thicken the soup with a little flour and flavor with mushroom or walnut catsup.

  6. Optionally, add dumplings when you add the peas and serve separately with the meat.

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. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Peas + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together890 recipes

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

  3. Beef + peastop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,044 recipes

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

  4. Flour + mushroomtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Peas + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,837 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Tops, peelings, and shells of vegetables
Browning and simmering them builds a deep, savory flavor base for the broth.
Dripping
Adds fat for browning the vegetables and carries flavor through the soup.
Shin of beef
Breaks down during gentle stewing into tender meat and enriches the broth with gelatin.
Peas
Add body and sweetness, softening as they stew in the broth.
Flour
Thickens the soup, giving it a smoother, more body-rich texture.

The step that matters

Stewing the meat gently. Gentle heat lets tough connective tissue break down into gelatin, making the meat tender. Boiling hard toughens muscle fibers and can make the meat fall apart or stay chewy.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, mushroom):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, mushroom. 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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