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Concord Soup

A hearty beef broth with carrots, turnips, celery, onions, peas, and seasonings, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Concord Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine beef, cowheel, carrots, turnips, celery, sweet herbs, browned onions, peas, and water in a large pot.

  2. Boil for several hours.

  3. Strain the soup.

  4. Set the strained liquid aside until the next day.

  5. Remove the fat from the liquid.

Finish the soup

  1. In the soup pot, fry an onion in a little butter.

  2. Stir in flour until browned.

  3. Add diced carrots, onions, turnips, and any remaining meat from the cowheel to the stock.

  4. Season with cloves, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  5. Boil for about 2 hours.

  6. Mix a little flour and butter together and stir the mixture into the soup.

  7. Boil for an additional 10 minutes.

  8. If desired, add red wine before serving hot.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef neck
Slow boiling over several hours turns the tough cut tender and gives the stock its body.
Flour
Browned in butter and stirred in, it thickens the soup and adds a toasty, roasted flavour.
Onions
Browned in butter at the start, they add sweetness and depth to the finished soup.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour, and hold their shape through the final simmer.
Cowheel
Releases gelatin into the stock during long boiling, giving it a richer, silkier body.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter mixture into the soup. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps; mixing it with butter first coats the starch grains so they disperse and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, butter, flour. 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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