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Stock for Vegetarian Soups

A stock made from pearl barley, lentils, carrots, onions, herbs, and spices, simmered for six hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Stock for Vegetarian Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine pearl barley and 7 pints of water in a large pot and bring to a boil.

  2. Add chopped carrots, onions, herbs, and salt.

  3. Stick one onion with the cloves and tie the herbs and celery seed in a piece of muslin.

  4. Simmer for 6 hours.

Strain and store

  1. Strain the stock and set it aside in a cool place.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Barley + lentilstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Pearl barley
Thickens the stock and adds body as its starch releases during long simmering.
Lentils
Break down during simmering, adding body and earthy flavour to the stock.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and savoury depth as they cook slowly in the liquid.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and aromatic depth to the stock.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, lentils, carrot, onion, celery, clove, pepper):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, lentils, carrot, onion, celery, clove, 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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