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Good Family Soup

A hearty beef soup with bacon, cabbage, potatoes, rice, carrots, and turnip simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Good Family Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Start the soup

  1. Combine beef, bacon, onions, and cabbage in a stewpan.

  2. Add potatoes, rice, carrots, turnip, salt, and pepper.

  3. Pour in 2 quarts of water and set over low heat.

  4. Skim carefully.

Simmer

  1. Gradually add 2 more quarts of water.

  2. Remove potatoes when done.

  3. Mash the potatoes.

  4. After 3 hours, take out the meat.

  5. Let the soup simmer for another hour.

Finish

  1. Strain the soup.

  2. Thicken it with the mashed potatoes.

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. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  4. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse lean beef
Provides the main meat flavour and a tender bite after long, slow simmering.
Bacon
Adds smoky, savoury fat that flavours the broth.
Potatoes
Break down when mashed, giving body and starch that thickens the soup.
Cabbage
Adds mild sweetness and soft texture as it cooks in the broth.
Rice
Softens and releases starch that adds a little body to the broth.

The step that matters

Thicken it with the mashed potatoes. Potato starch thickens liquid as it is heated and dispersed. Stir the mash in evenly while the soup is hot so it blends smoothly instead of clumping.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, potato, rice, carrot, turnip, 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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