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Brown Soup

A soup made from game or poultry scraps, rice flour, stock, Worcestershire sauce, vegetables, herbs, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Brown Soup

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a pot and fry the onion and chopped meat until browned.

  2. Stir in the rice flour and cook for a minute.

  3. Add the stock, Worcestershire sauce, carrot, turnip, sweet herbs, celery seed, peppercorns, and cloves tied in a muslin bag.

  4. Cook slowly until the meat is tender enough to be rubbed through a sieve.

  5. Reheat the soup and season with salt and pepper to taste.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Rice flour
Thickens the stock slightly as it cooks, giving the soup a fuller body.
Onion
Browns in the butter to build a deeper, savoury flavour base.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body as it softens in the simmering stock.
Turnip
Softens during simmering and adds subtle sweetness and body to the soup.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries and blends all the other flavours.

The step that matters

Frying the onion and meat until browned. Browning through the Maillard reaction creates deep, roasted flavours that a pale fry cannot. Too little heat or crowding the pot steams the meat instead, leaving the soup flat.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, flour, sauce, onion, carrot, turnip, celery):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, sauce, onion, carrot, turnip, celery. 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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