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Soup

Amber Soup

A vegetable soup made with onion, carrot, turnip, parsnip, ham or bacon fat, herbs, spices, stock, and caramel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Amber Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Fry the sliced onion, carrot, turnip, and parsnip in the fat from ham or bacon until light brown.

  2. Add the fried vegetables to a soup kettle with parsley, thyme, bay leaf, peppercorns, and cloves.

  3. Cover with 5 quarts of stock and let it simmer for 1 hour.

Clarify and serve

  1. Strain the soup, then add a little cold water and skim off the grease.

  2. Clarify the soup and heat it to boiling point.

  3. Season the soup, add the caramel, and serve.

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 + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  5. Parsnip + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together270 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

Onion, carrot, turnip, and parsnip
Browning in the fat builds the roasted, savory flavor that gives the soup its amber color.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries the flavor of the aromatics.
Caramel
Deepens the color of the soup and adds a slight bittersweet note.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables until light brown. Browning the vegetables in fat creates Maillard and caramelized flavors that form the base of the soup. Pale vegetables give a flat taste, and over-browned ones turn bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, parsnip, ham, parsley, thyme, clove):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsnip, ham, parsley, thyme, clove. 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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