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A thickened meat soup with flour, butter, herbs, roots, turnip, truffles, and morels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,874 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the thickener

  1. Mix 1 tea-cup of flour with enough water to make a smooth paste.

Make the soup

  1. Place the meat at the bottom of the pan and stew it with herbs and roots before adding water.

  2. Ensure the gravy is almost dried up before adding water.

  3. Boil the mixture into the soup to remove excess fat.

  4. For richness, add a good lump of butter mixed with flour and boil it in the soup.

  5. To make strong onions mild, boil a turnip with them.

  6. If the soup is too weak, leave it uncovered while boiling to allow evaporation.

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. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Meat + truffletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Butter + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells with heat, giving the broth body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour through the soup.
Meat
Gives the soup its main savoury flavour and body as it stews.
Turnip
Boiled with the onions to mellow their sharp flavour.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into a smooth paste. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps into lumps that will not dissolve. Mixing it with cold water first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens the soup smoothly.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tea, flour, butter, meat, truffle):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, flour, butter, meat, truffle. 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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