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Bone Soup

A soup made by simmering bones with water, carrots, turnips, onion, broken rice, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bone Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Simmer the bones

  1. Break the bones and place them in a saucepan with 1½ pints of cold water for every pound of bone.

  2. Boil for three to four hours.

Add the vegetables and finish

  1. Add the carrots, turnips, onion, parsley, herbs, broken rice, pepper, salt, cloves, and spice.

  2. Boil for another hour, then remove the bones and serve.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Bones
Long simmering draws gelatin and flavour from the bones into the water, giving the soup body.
Broken rice
Its starch thickens the soup as it cooks.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour to the broth as they soften.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and soft texture as they cook through.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Boiling the bones for three to four hours. Bones release gelatin and flavour slowly over long cooking. Stopping early leaves a thin, weak broth, so the bones need the full simmer before the vegetables go in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, rice, pepper, clove):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, rice, pepper, clove. 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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