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Lamb Soup

A hearty lamb soup with vegetables and optional thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and okra share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lamb Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Wash the neck and breast of lamb.

  2. In a pot, add the lamb, 4 cups of water, and 1 teaspoon of salt.

  3. Bring to a boil and cook for 1 hour.

Add the vegetables

  1. Add the sliced onions, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and sweet herbs.

  2. If in season, add tomatoes and okras.

  3. Once the vegetables are tender, remove the meat.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix flour with a little water to form a smooth paste and add to the soup.

  2. Optionally, add noodles, dumplings, or rice for thickness.

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. Turnip + okratop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + okratop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  5. Onion + okratop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the broth is built on.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it is stirred into the liquid.
Potatoes
Soften as they cook, adding body and starch to the broth.
Onions
Build savoury sweetness as they soften in the broth.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour paste. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, so it must be blended smoothly with a little water first. Starch then thickens the soup as it heats.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, onion, carrot, turnip, potato, okra, flour):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, onion, carrot, turnip, potato, okra, flour. 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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