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Bone Soup

A hearty soup made by simmering bones, meat, vegetables, herbs, and spices in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bone Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Fry the pieces of meat with the onion in drippings until brown.

  2. Add the meat and onion to 4 pints of water and bring near to boiling.

  3. Add the salt to raise the scum and skim well.

  4. Once boiling, add the carrots, turnips, parsnip, herbs, celery, mace, and peppercorns.

  5. Let it simmer gently for 2 hours.

Finish the soup

  1. Strain the soup and return it to the saucepan with the sliced vegetables.

  2. Thicken the soup with 1 dessert spoonful of flour for every pint of liquid.

  3. Color with burnt sugar if desired.

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. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Pieces of meat
Browning in drippings and simmering build a deep, savory flavor in the broth.
Bones
Release gelatin and minerals during long simmering, giving the broth body and richness.
Corn flour or common flour
Starch thickens the strained liquid so it feels fuller in the mouth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and aromatic depth as they cook into the broth.

The step that matters

Skimming after adding the salt. Salt helps coagulate the scum that rises as proteins denature near boiling. Skimming it removes these impurities, keeping the broth clear and clean-tasting.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, onion, carrot, turnip, parsnip, celery, corn):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion, carrot, turnip, parsnip, celery, corn. 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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