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Gravy Soup

A hearty beef soup made with a leg of beef, herbs, spices, vegetables, vermicelli, soy sauce, mushroom ketchup, and a French roll.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Wash and soak the leg of beef.

  2. Break the bone and place the leg in a pot with 1 gallon of water.

  3. Add the sweet herbs, sliced onions, 2 blades of mace, 3 cloves, 20 berries of allspice, and 40 black peppercorns.

  4. Simmer until the soup reaches your desired richness.

  5. Remove the meat for serving.

  6. The next day, remove the layer of fat from the soup for basting or pie crust.

Add the vegetables and noodles

  1. Prepare diced carrots, turnips, and celery.

  2. Simmer the vegetables until tender, or use them for flavor only.

  3. Boil the vermicelli for 15 minutes.

  4. Stir in the soy sauce and mushroom ketchup.

Serve

  1. Heat the French roll.

  2. Place the heated roll in the soup until moist and serve in a tureen.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of beef
Gives the broth its meaty body and rich flavor as it simmers.
Sliced onions
Add sweetness and savory depth to the broth as they cook down.
Soy sauce
Adds savory, salty depth and deeper color to the finished soup.
Mushroom ketchup
Contributes savory umami flavor that rounds out the broth.
French roll
Soaks up broth, becoming moist and tender enough to eat with the soup.

The step that matters

Simmer until the soup reaches your desired richness. Long, gentle simmering extracts collagen and flavor from the beef bone and meat. Too short a simmer leaves a thin broth, while a hard boil can make it cloudy and greasy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, clove, allspice, carrot, turnip, celery. 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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