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Cottage Soup

A hearty beef and bacon soup with vegetables and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cottage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the beef into thin slices and the bacon into cubes.

  2. Slice the onion, carrot, and turnips.

  3. Prepare the potatoes; if large, cut them in half.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the dripping in a large pot over medium heat.

  2. Fry the bacon, beef, and onion until browned.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables, water, salt, and pepper.

  4. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

  5. Add the potatoes to the soup and cook for 1 hour.

  6. Sprinkle in the rice and cook for an additional 30 minutes.

  7. Check that the potatoes and rice are tender, season to taste, and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Lean neck of beef
Provides meaty flavour and substance, becoming tender during long simmering.
Streaky bacon
Adds fat and smoky, savoury flavour to the pot as it browns.
Potatoes
Thicken the broth slightly as they break down and add body.
Rice
Releases starch into the broth, helping to thicken it.

The step that matters

Browning the bacon, beef, and onion. Frying until well browned creates Maillard reactions that build deep savoury flavour, which a simmered soup cannot develop later. Pale frying yields a flatter, blander broth.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, carrot, potato, rice, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, potato, rice, pepper. 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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