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Gravy Soup

A hearty soup made from beef bones, neck beef, root vegetables, and herbs, finished with butter and served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and turnip share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 65 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the bones of a rump of beef and a piece of neck beef until rich.

  2. Strain the liquid through a sieve.

  3. Melt some butter and add it to the strained liquid.

Finish and serve

  1. Add an onion, a few cloves, celery, endive, turnips, and carrots in desired amounts.

  2. Boil until the herbs and roots are tender.

  3. Serve with toasted bread cut into small pieces.

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. Endive + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef bones
Release gelatin and rich flavor into the broth during long boiling.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded, silky richness to the strained broth.
Turnips
Soften during boiling and add mild sweetness and body to the soup.
Carrots
Soften during boiling and add natural sweetness and color to the soup.
Toasted bread
Adds crisp, browned texture that contrasts with the soft soup.

The step that matters

Boil until the herbs and roots are tender. Vegetables cooked too briefly stay firm and taste raw, while overcooking turns them mushy and dulls the broth's clean flavor. Check them by piercing with a knife.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, clove, celery, endive, turnip, carrot, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, clove, celery, endive, turnip, carrot, 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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