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Matso Soup

A beef and suet thickened soup with matso flour, eggs, and optional onion, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Matso Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a large pot, boil the beef and calf's foot (if using) in 3-4 quarts of water.

  2. Season with celery, carrots, turnips, pepper, coarse sea salt, and sweet herbs.

  3. Let the mixture stew gently for 8 hours.

  4. Strain the soup and let it cool to remove the fat.

  5. Return the soup to the saucepan to warm up.

Make the matso balls

  1. In a bowl, mix matso flour, chopped suet, pepper, salt, ginger, nutmeg, and beaten eggs to form a paste.

  2. Optionally, add a small onion, shred it and brown in oil.

  3. Shape the paste into large balls, ensuring they are light.

Serve

  1. Ten minutes before serving, add the balls to the soup.

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. Celery + carrottop 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. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + gingertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,377 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Matso flour
Forms the body of the paste that holds the balls together.
Eggs
Bind the paste and help the balls set as they cook.
Chopped suet
Adds fat that keeps the balls tender and moist.
Beef
Slow stewing draws flavor and gelatin into the broth.

The step that matters

Shaping the paste into light balls. Overworking or packing the paste makes dense, heavy balls. Keeping the mixture loose and light lets the balls stay tender when they simmer in the broth.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, celery, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour, nutmeg. 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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