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Soup

Julienne Soup

A beef soup with julienned strips, vegetables, egg white, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Julienne Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In an enamel saucepan, combine the beef, cold water, salt, pepper, and chopped onion.

  2. Bring to a boil slowly, skim well, then simmer for about 2 hours.

  3. Strain the broth through a fine sieve.

  4. Add the beaten egg white and shell to the broth, reheat, and beat with a spoon.

  5. If necessary, strain carefully through a fine piece of muslin.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the cooked vegetables and reheat.

  2. Stir in the sherry just before serving.

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. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Onion + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Gives the broth its meaty flavour as it simmers in the water.
Egg white and shell
Clarifies the broth, as the proteins bind cloudy particles that are then strained out.
Sherry
Adds a light, aromatic sweetness and acidity to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Add the egg white and shell to the broth, reheat, and beat with a spoon.. Reheating must be gentle and the broth must not be stirred hard, because the egg white needs to coagulate and trap cloudy particles. Stirring too vigorously breaks up the raft, leaving the broth cloudy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, egg, sherry):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, egg, sherry. 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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