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Soup

Soup or Stock From One Pound of Beef

A simple beef stock made by simmering minced beef in water with salt, seasonings, and optional roast onions or burnt sugar for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Soup or Stock From One Pound of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine minced beef and cold water in a pot.

  2. Heat slowly to boiling for 2 to 3 hours.

  3. Boil briskly for 1 to 2 minutes.

  4. Strain the liquid through a towel.

  5. Mix in salt and other seasonings.

  6. Add roast onions or burnt sugar for a darker color.

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. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Lean beef
Provides the meat flavor and dissolved protein that give the stock its body.
Cold water
Extracts flavor from the beef as it heats slowly and serves as the stock's liquid base.
Roast onions
Add color and a deeper, toasted flavor to the stock.
Burnt sugar
Deepens the stock's color and adds a slightly bittersweet, caramel-like note.

The step that matters

Heat slowly to boiling. Starting with cold water and heating gradually lets flavor and gelatin leach out of the meat before proteins coagulate. Rapid heating makes the stock cloudy and less clear.

“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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