Skip to main content
Main

Cow-heel Soup

A hearty soup made from cow heel, water, vegetables, and sago, seasoned with lemon, parsley, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Cow-heel Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Clean and scald the cow-heel, then divide it into 4 parts.

  2. Place the cow-heel in a large pot with the cold water and add a good pinch of salt.

  3. Bring to a boil, skim off any foam, and add the onion, carrot, and celery.

  4. Let the mixture simmer gently for 3 to 4 hours.

  5. Strain the soup and season to taste.

Finish the soup

  1. Remove some meat from the bones, chop it into small pieces, and return it to the broth.

  2. Bring the soup to a boil again and stir in the sago or crushed tapioca.

  3. Boil for another 22 minutes, then serve with chopped parsley and lemon juice added 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cow-heel
Provides gelatin and rich meat flavour as it simmers into the broth.
Sago or crushed tapioca
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when the liquid boils.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty broth.
Onion, carrot and celery
Build the aromatic base that flavours the long-simmered broth.

The step that matters

Simmering the broth gently. A gentle simmer draws collagen and flavour from the bones without clouding the broth. A hard boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and makes the soup cloudy and greasy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, parsley, lemon, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, parsley, lemon, pepper, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipes