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A beef soup made by simmering beef with spices, then seasoning with sugar, soy sauce, and mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Have the butcher cut 5 or 6 even pieces from the thick fleshy part of the beef and divide the knuckle.

  2. Place the beef in a large pot and add 3 quarts of cold water.

  3. Bring the water to a boil slowly, skimming off any impurities.

Make the soup

  1. Add salt, peppercorns, cloves, mace, savory herbs, carrots, celery, and onion if using.

  2. Stew the mixture gently for 4 hours until the beef is tender.

  3. Remove the beef and let the soup simmer for an additional 2 to 3 hours.

  4. Strain the soup through a fine sieve into a clean pot.

  5. Once cooled, remove any fat from the surface.

Season and finish

  1. Heat 2 quarts of the soup, then stir in sugar, soy sauce, and mushroom ketchup or Harvey's sauce.

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. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  4. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main body and rich flavor, and its connective tissue turns tender during long, gentle stewing.
Sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness that balances the savory broth.
Soy sauce
Adds savory depth and salty umami to the finished broth.

The step that matters

Bringing the water to a boil slowly while skimming. Heating gently lets proteins and impurities rise to the surface in foam, which can be skimmed off. Boiling hard would emulsify these into the broth and make it cloudy.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, clove, mace, carrot, celery, sugar, sauce):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, clove, mace, carrot, celery, sugar, sauce. 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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