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Clear or Amber Soup

A clear beef broth made with bone, meat, vegetables, and clarified with egg white, served with lemon slices and optional sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,097 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Clear or Amber Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Cut the meat from the beef bone into small pieces.

  2. Slice the onions and fry the ham (or salt pork) in a pot.

  3. Fry the onions until they are a bright brown in the fat.

  4. Add the pieces of beef to the pot and brown them.

  5. Put all the ingredients, including the bones, into a soup kettle.

  6. Add the cold water and let it gradually come to a boil.

  7. Skim the surface carefully, then boil slowly for 5 to 7 hours.

Chill and clarify

  1. Strain the soup and set it in a cold place overnight.

  2. Remove the fat the next day and heat the soup on the fire for 1 hour before serving.

  3. In a bowl, beat the egg white with a tablespoon of cold water.

  4. Add a little hot soup to the egg mixture, then pour it into the kettle.

  5. Let the soup boil slowly for 10 minutes, then strain again to ensure clarity.

  6. Return the soup to the fire and heat to boiling point.

Serve

  1. Before serving, add lemon slices and sherry to the 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. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsnip + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together561 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Beef + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef soup bone
Releases gelatin and flavour into the broth during long simmering, giving body.
Egg white
Its proteins coagulate and trap fine particles, clearing the cloudy broth.
Chicken
Adds meaty flavour and gelatin to the broth during the long simmer.
Onions
Browning in the fat builds deeper colour and savoury, caramelised flavour.

The step that matters

Skim the surface carefully. Skimming removes coagulated proteins and fat that would otherwise cloud the broth and make it greasy. Keeping the simmer slow prevents emulsified particles from mixing back in and clouding the soup.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, chicken, ham, onion, carrot, parsnip, celery):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, chicken, ham, onion, carrot, parsnip, celery. 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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