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Brown Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup of onions, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, turnip, and bread simmered in water with butter, salt, and pepper.

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

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

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

  3. Boil for three to four hours.

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

  5. 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
Browned in the pan first, they add deep colour and a savoury, caramelised flavour to the soup.
Potatoes
Break down during long simmering and help thicken the soup and give it body.
Bread
Toasted bread thickens the soup and adds body as it breaks down during boiling.
Cabbage
Long cooking softens its fibres and adds bulk and mild sweetness to the broth.

The step that matters

Browning the onion. Brown but not burnt is the target. Browning builds deep flavour through caramelisation, while burnt onion turns bitter and can spoil the whole pot.

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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