Skip to main content
Main

Beef Soup with Vegetables

A hearty beef soup made with a beef shank or soup bone, okra, tomatoes, corn, butter beans, potatoes, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Okra and beans share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 66 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Beef Soup with Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Crack the bone in several places and place it in a pot with the cold water at 7 o'clock in the morning.

  2. Set the pot on the back of the stove and let it come slowly to a simmer.

Add the vegetables

  1. At 9 or 10 o'clock, mince the okra and tomatoes very finely and add them to the soup pot.

  2. Add corn and butter beans to the pot if desired.

  3. Cut the Irish potatoes into the soup and let everything simmer slowly until dinner time.

  4. Before serving, season with salt, pepper, and a tablespoon of catsup or Worcestershire sauce.

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. Okra + beanstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together66 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Tomato + beanstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  3. Corn + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,211 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Okra + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Corn + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together938 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef shank or soup bone
Provides flavor and body to the broth as it simmers slowly over hours.
Okra
Releases natural thickening that gives the soup a silky body as it cooks.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and a bright flavor that balances the rich beef broth.
Irish potatoes
Absorb broth flavor and add starch that gives the soup substance.

The step that matters

Slow simmer from morning until dinner. A gentle, steady simmer draws flavor and gelatin from the bone without toughening or breaking down the mixture. Boiling hard makes the broth cloudy and can make the vegetables mushy.

Swap the okra

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, tomato, corn, butter, beans, potato, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Okrathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, tomato, corn, butter, beans, potato, 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipes