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Soup

Another Ox Cheek Soup

A hearty soup made from ox cheek, turnips, onions, carrots, celery, and herbs, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Another Ox Cheek Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Wash the ox cheek and cut it into small pieces.

Make the gravy

  1. Stew the pieces in 4 to 5 quarts of water until tender, adding turnips, thyme, parsley, black peppercorns, and peas.

  2. Strain the gravy and let it stand overnight.

Finish the soup

  1. Remove the fat and cut the meat from the bones into small pieces.

  2. Stew the meat in the gravy with sliced onions, fry until light brown, along with carrots, celery, a little salt, and cayenne pepper.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox cheek
Provides rich meat and gelatin that give the broth body after long stewing.
Onions
Sweetness and savory depth as they brown during frying.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body to the stewed broth.
Carrots
Add sweetness and color to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stew the pieces until tender. Ox cheek is dense connective tissue. It needs long, gentle simmering so the collagen breaks down into gelatin; if the heat is too high or the time too short, the meat stays tough and the broth thin.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, thyme, parsley, onion, carrot, celery, pepper):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, thyme, parsley, onion, carrot, celery, pepper. 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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