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Concord Soup

A beef and vegetable soup with carrots, turnips, celery, onions, peas, and optional red wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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. In a large pot, combine the beef, cowheel, carrots, turnips, celery, sweet herbs, browned onions, peas, and water.

  2. Boil for several hours.

  3. Strain the soup.

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

  5. Remove the fat.

Finish the soup

  1. Fry an onion in a little butter.

  2. Stir in flour until browned.

  3. Cut the remaining carrots, onions, turnips, and any leftover meat into 1-inch pieces.

  4. Add the pieces to the stock.

  5. Season with cloves, salt, and pepper.

  6. Boil for about 2 hours.

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

  8. Boil for an additional 10 minutes.

  9. Add the 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

Neck of beef
Releases flavour and gelatin into the stock during long simmering, giving body to the soup.
Cowheel
Adds gelatin, which gives the stock a richer, silkier body.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it a fuller texture.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and with flour forms a thickening roux.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Removing the fat after chilling. Fat that is not skimmed from the chilled stock stays liquid and floats on top, making the soup greasy. Chilling the stock overnight lets the fat solidify so it can be lifted off cleanly.

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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