Name: Beef and Vegetable Soup
Ingredients: 1 soup bone or piece of meat; Salt and pepper to taste; 1 carrot, chopped; 1 onion, chopped; 1 turnip, chopped; 2 potatoes, chopped; 1 head celery, chopped; A small amount of cabbage, chopped

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 ↓

Beef and Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

Boil the soup bone or meat a day before you want to serve it.
Skim off the grease the next day and melt the jelly.

Make the soup

Add salt and pepper to taste.
Add the chopped carrot, onion, turnip, potatoes, celery, and cabbage.
Boil for five hours.

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.

Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,418 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Soup bone or meat: Releases flavor and gelatin into the broth as it simmers for hours.
Potatoes: Break down slightly as they cook, thickening the broth and adding body.
Carrot: Adds natural sweetness and color to the broth as it cooks.
Onion: Adds aromatic depth and savory sweetness to the broth.

Swap the cabbage

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

Leekfits better
Parsnipfits better
Okrafits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, carrot, onion, turnip, potato, celery. 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.