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To Make Clear Gravy Soup

A clear soup made from beef, mutton, or veal with carrots, turnips, onions, and clarified with egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery 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 ↓

To Make Clear Gravy Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a large pot, add the meat and cover with cold water.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Add more cold water to remove scum.

  4. Season with parsley root, carrot, onion, bacon.

  5. Boil for at least 1.5 hours until tender.

  6. Strain the broth.

  7. Set aside.

Prepare the vegetables

  1. In a separate pan, fry the carrots, turnips, and onions until soft.

  2. Add pepper, salt, cloves, and celery.

  3. Stew together.

  4. Strain the mixture.

  5. Let it cool.

  6. Skim off the fat.

Clarify and serve

  1. Boil the strained broth again with egg whites to clarify.

  2. Strain through a cloth.

  3. Serve with soaked roll garnished with almonds or add vermicelli or macaroni.

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 + celerytop 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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Releases flavour and gelatin into the water as it simmers, giving the broth body.
Egg whites
Coagulate as they heat, trapping suspended particles so they can be strained out for a clear broth.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury depth when fried until soft before stewing.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and aroma to the broth.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Boil the broth again with egg whites. Egg whites must be whisked into cold broth and heated gently; as they set they gather fine particles, which the cloth strains out. Boiling hard too early breaks up the foam and leaves the soup cloudy.

Swap the carrot

The recipe marks carrot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, turnip, onion, pepper, clove, celery, egg):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Carrotthe original
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Lettucefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, turnip, onion, pepper, clove, celery, egg. 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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