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Soup

Brown Soup

A beef soup simmered with onions, spices, celery tops, and herbs, finished with Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Brown Soup

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Boil the beef and water for one hour.

  2. Fry the onions in good dripping until soft and light brown.

  3. Add the fried onions to the soup along with the ground cloves, pepper, mace, allspice, celery tops, and soup herbs.

  4. Cook slowly for two hours or until the meat falls apart.

Strain and season

  1. Strain the soup through a wire sieve and return it to the heat.

  2. Add salt to taste, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,422 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main protein and body, breaking down into tender meat during slow cooking.
Onions
Add sweetness and depth when fried until soft and light brown before going into the soup.
Celery tops
Contribute a fresh, savoury vegetable aroma to the broth during long simmering.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the finished soup and balances its rich flavour.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for two hours or until the meat falls apart. A gentle simmer lets connective tissue in the beef slowly break down into gelatin, making the meat tender and the broth fuller. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and cloud the soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, clove, pepper, allspice, celery, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, clove, pepper, allspice, celery, sauce. 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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