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Matso Soup

A hearty beef broth with matso flour balls, eggs, suet, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Matso Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a large pot, boil the beef and calf's foot in water with celery, carrots, turnips, pepper, salt, and sweet herbs for 8 hours.

  2. Strain the broth and let it cool, then remove the fat.

  3. Return the broth to the pot and warm it up.

Make the matzo balls

  1. In a bowl, mix matso flour, chopped suet, and seasonings.

  2. Add beaten eggs to the mixture and form into large balls.

  3. Brown the shredded onion in oil and add to the mixture.

Serve

  1. Drop the balls into the soup 10 minutes before serving.

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. Celery + carrottop 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. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + gingertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,377 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the matzo flour and suet so the balls hold their shape.
Matso flour
Forms the body of the dumplings, giving them structure and a dense texture.
Chopped suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings moist and tender.
Gravy beef
Releases flavor and gelatin into the broth during long simmering.
Shin of beef
Adds rich beefy flavor and body to the broth during long simmering.

The step that matters

Drop the balls into the soup 10 minutes before serving. Matzo balls are dense and absorb liquid as they cook. Cooking them too long in simmering broth can make them soft and waterlogged, so timing the drop matters.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, celery, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour, nutmeg):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, celery, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour, nutmeg. 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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