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Kidney Soup

A hearty soup made with beef shank, ox kidney, vegetables, and seasonings, thickened with cornflour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Kidney Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the vegetables

  1. In a large pot, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped onions, carrot, and turnip; sauté until softened.

Simmer the soup

  1. Add the beef shank and kidney, then cover with water and bring to a boil.

  2. Reduce heat and simmer for 1-2 hours until the meat is tender.

  3. Remove the meat, chop it, and return it to the pot.

Thicken and season

  1. Mix cornflour with a little water to make a paste, then stir into the soup to thicken.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, mustard, and sugar to taste.

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. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 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

Beef shank
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue, leaving the meat tender and adding body to the broth.
Ox kidney
Contributes a rich, deep meaty flavour to the broth as it cooks.
Butter
Fat that softens the onions, carrot and turnip and carries their flavour into the soup.
Cornflour
Starch that swells when heated, thickening the soup into a smoother body.

The step that matters

Simmering the beef shank and kidney. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil lets the connective tissue soften slowly. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can make the broth cloudy.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, flour, carrot, turnip, onion, 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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