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Beef Soup

A hearty soup made with boiled beef, butter, browned flour, carrot, vermicelli, and mashed hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the soup meat in water for 8 hours.

  2. Let the soup stand overnight.

  3. Skim off the grease the next day.

  4. Season the soup with salt and pepper.

  5. Rub the butter into the browned flour and add it to the soup.

  6. Stir in the grated carrot and a little vermicelli.

Serve

  1. Hard-boil the eggs, mash them smooth, and place them in a tureen.

  2. Pour the soup over the mashed eggs.

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. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Browned flour
Thickens the soup and adds a toasted, nutty flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the browned flour blend smoothly into the soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Mashed in the tureen, they add body and a rich, creamy texture.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper, butter, flour, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, butter, flour, 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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