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Broths, Gravies, and Soots

A curry-flavored beef broth made with curry powder, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Broths, Gravies, and Soots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix curry powder, flour, cold water, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add the mixture to a soup pot with the beef.

Make the broth

  1. Cover the beef with cold water and heat gradually until nearly boiling, about 1 hour.

  2. Skim the surface of the broth while it heats.

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. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meat and collagen that give the broth body and savory depth as it simmers.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the broth slightly and helps the curry powder mix evenly into the liquid.
Curry powder
Supplies the warm, aromatic spice flavor that defines the broth.

The step that matters

Heat gradually and skim the surface. Heating slowly lets fat and impurities rise gradually so they can be skimmed off, giving a clearer, cleaner-tasting broth. Rapid boiling would emulsify fat into the liquid and cloud it.

“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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