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Soup

Brown Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with onions, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, turnip, parsley, and bread, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brown Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Fry a slice of onion in a large saucepan until brown but not burnt.

  2. Add water, coarse sea salt, pepper, toasted bread, and vegetables cut into small pieces.

  3. Boil for three to four hours.

Finish

  1. Rub the vegetables through a colander and boil again for ten minutes.

  2. If the soup is too thick, add a little more water.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browning in the pan builds deep, savoury flavour and colour in the soup base.
Toasted bread
Breaks down during long boiling, helping to thicken the soup and give it body.
Potatoes
Their starch breaks down during simmering, thickening the soup and adding body.
Carrots
Release natural sugars as they cook, adding gentle sweetness and body.

The step that matters

Browning the onion slice. Browning drives Maillard reactions that create rich, savoury flavour. Past brown, sugars turn bitter and burnt flavours can carry through the whole pot, so heat should be watched closely.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, onion, potato, carrot, turnip, parsley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, onion, potato, carrot, turnip, parsley. 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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