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Brown Soup

A hearty soup made with soup bone, vegetables, onions, and thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Brown Soup

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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the soup bone and cut the meat into small pieces.

  2. In a pot, combine the water, sliced turnip, carrot, parsley, celery, cloves, peppercorns, and salt.

  3. Fry the onions in a little butter until rich brown, then add to the soup mixture.

  4. Brown the reserved meat in the same pan and add it to the pot.

  5. Let the mixture stand for at least 1 hour, or overnight in cool weather.

Simmer and finish

  1. Simmer slowly, adding more water as necessary.

  2. Strain the soup, then add the strained tomato.

  3. Thicken with the flour and browned butter mixed together.

  4. Add caramel for a darker color if desired.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Soup bone
Releases meat flavor and gelatin into the broth during long, slow simmering.
Onions
Browning in butter adds deep, sweet, savory flavor and color to the soup.
Strained tomato
Adds acidity and savory depth, along with a reddish tint to the broth.
Flour
Combined with browned butter, it thickens the strained soup into a smoother body.
Caramel
Deepens the soup's color toward a darker brown.

The step that matters

Fry the onions until rich brown. Onions that are only lightly cooked give pale, sweet flavor. Deep browning through the Maillard reaction and caramelization builds the roasted, savory taste that defines this brown soup.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, parsley, celery, clove, onion, butter. 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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