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Very Rich Beef Soup

A hearty beef soup made with soup meat, vegetables, spices, and caramelized sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Very Rich Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Rub coarse sea salt into the soup meat to extract the juice.

  2. Add enough cold water to achieve the desired quantity.

Simmer

  1. As the water boils away, add boiling water to maintain the level.

  2. Skim the surface and boil slowly.

  3. Add the onion, turnip, carrot, celery, parsley, mace, cloves, salt, pepper, and tomato if using.

  4. Add caramel or burnt sugar.

  5. Cover and boil gently until the vegetables are tender.

  6. Strain the soup before serving.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Soup meat
Gives the broth its main meaty flavour and body as it simmers.
Caramel or burnt sugar
Adds deep colour and a slightly bittersweet, toasted flavour to the broth.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the broth as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Skim the surface and boil slowly. Foam and fat rise to the surface while the meat cooks. Skimming removes them, and a gentle simmer keeps the broth clear instead of cloudy and greasy.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion, turnip, carrot, celery, parsley, clove. 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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