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A Good Stock for Soups

A stock made by simmering wheat bran with water, salt, peppercorns, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and clove work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 235 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

A Good Stock for Soups

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stir the wheat bran into cold water.

  2. Heat slowly to boiling point, then simmer for 2 hours.

  3. Strain through a linen cloth and store for use.

  4. Add salt, peppercorns, and cloves half an hour before straining to flavor the stock.

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. Wheat + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Peppercorns
Add a sharp, woody aroma and mild heat to the stock.
Cloves
Add a strong, warm aroma that flavors the stock in small amounts.

The step that matters

Add the salt, peppercorns, and cloves half an hour before straining. Whole spices release flavor gradually, and cloves in particular can turn bitter and overpowering with long simmering, so adding them near the end keeps the stock balanced.

“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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