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Concord Soup

A hearty beef soup with carrots, turnips, celery, onions, peas, and optional red wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Concord Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine the beef, cow heel, carrots, turnips, celery, sweet herbs, onions, peas, and water in a large pot.

  2. Boil the mixture for several hours.

  3. Strain the soup to remove solids.

Finish the soup

  1. Melt the butter in the pot.

  2. Fry the onions until browned.

  3. Dredge the onions in flour.

  4. Stir until the mixture turns brown.

  5. Add diced carrots, onions, turnips, and any remaining meat from the cow heel.

  6. Season with salt, pepper, and cloves.

  7. Add the strained stock.

  8. Boil for about 2 hours.

  9. Mix a little flour and butter together. Stir the mixture into the soup.

  10. Boil for an additional 10 minutes.

  11. If desired, add red wine before serving hot.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 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

Flour
Thickens the soup and helps the onions brown when dredged and stirred.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for frying the onions and for the flour thickener.
Onions
Browned in butter, they add sweetness and deep savory color to the soup.
Neck of beef
Releases flavor and gelatin into the stock during long simmering.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter into the soup. Added raw, flour clumps and tastes pasty; mixing it with butter first and stirring it into hot liquid lets the starch disperse and thicken evenly.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, pepper, butter. 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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