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Beef Booth

A beef soup simmered with mace, parsley, and bread, served with toasted bread cubes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,032 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Beef Booth

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Crack the bone of the leg of beef into two or three parts and wash it clean.

  2. Place the beef in a pot with 1 gallon of water and skim the surface.

  3. Add 2-3 blades of mace, a bundle of parsley, and a crust of bread.

Make the soup

  1. Boil until the beef is tender and the sinews are soft.

Serve

  1. Toast some bread and cut it into small cubes.

  2. Place the toasted bread in a tureen, add the meat, and pour the soup over it.

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 + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  2. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

  4. Beef + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

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

  5. Mace + breadtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,005 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of beef
Provides the main meat and, through the bone and sinews, rich flavour and body to the broth.
Water
Forms the broth that extracts flavour and gelatin from the beef during long simmering.
Bread crust
Adds a little body and soaks up some of the broth's flavour as it simmers.
Toasted bread
Gives the dish a crisp, browned texture that softens when the hot soup is poured over it.

The step that matters

Boil until the beef is tender and the sinews are soft. Connective tissue in the sinews and bone needs long, gentle simmering to break down into gelatin. Stopping early leaves the meat tough and the broth thin, while a hard rolling boil can toughen the meat and cloud the soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, parsley, bread):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Pepperfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, parsley, bread. 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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