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Lamb Soup

A hearty lamb soup with rice, turnips, potatoes, onions, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 367 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lamb Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lamb and place it in a stew-pan.

  2. Add water according to the quantity of soup desired.

Make the soup

  1. Stir in the rice, turnips, onions, marjoram, salt, black pepper, and red pepper.

  2. Boil over low heat for about 1 hour.

  3. Add the quartered potatoes and wash them before adding.

  4. Stir in the white sugar and cook until nearly done.

  5. Add the minced parsley just before serving.

Serve

  1. Place the meat on a dish, garnish with parsley, and serve the soup hot in a tureen.

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 + marjoramtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together367 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Marjoram + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Marjoram + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Gives the soup its meaty flavour and richness as it simmers into the broth.
Rice
Thickens the broth and adds body as its starch softens during the long simmer.
Turnips
Soften during simmering and add a mildly sweet, earthy flavour to the broth.
Onions
Build the savoury base of the soup as they soften and release their sweetness.
White potatoes
Soften into the broth, adding starch that gives the soup more body.
White sugar
Balances the savoury and peppery flavours with a touch of sweetness.

The step that matters

Add the potatoes and sugar near the end. Potatoes added too early can break down and cloud the broth, and sugar added before the long simmer can over-caramelise or taste heavy. Adding them once the soup is nearly done keeps the texture clean and the flavour balanced.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, rice, turnip, marjoram, pepper, potato, sugar):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, rice, turnip, marjoram, pepper, potato, sugar. 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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