Skip to main content
Main

Brown Macaroni Soup

A hearty soup of browned vegetables, herbs, and macaroni simmered in bone stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Brown Macaroni Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the onion or leek and carrot, and bundle the herbs.

Make the soup

  1. Fry the vegetables and peppercorns in butter until browned but not burnt.

  2. Sprinkle cornflour over the vegetables and pour in boiling stock, stirring until it boils.

  3. Let it simmer for 1 hour.

  4. If not brown enough, burn a little sugar in a spoon and stir it in.

  5. Strain the soup through a wire sieve and return it to the saucepan.

Add macaroni and serve

  1. Boil the macaroni in salted water for 20 minutes, strain, and cut into 1-inch pieces.

  2. Add the macaroni to the soup and simmer for 15 minutes.

  3. Season with salt and pepper if necessary, and serve hot.

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 + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that browns the vegetables, adding a rich, toasty flavour to the base.
Cornflour
Starch that thickens the stock as it comes to the boil.
Macaroni
Pasta pieces that add body and bulk to the finished soup.
Onion or leek
Aromatic base that softens and browns, sweetening and deepening the stock.
Carrot
Vegetable that browns with the onion, adding sweetness and colour to the stock.
Sugar
Burnt sugar deepens the colour and adds a slight bitter caramel note if the soup is too pale.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables in butter. Browning gives the soup its colour and flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. If the vegetables burn, the soup turns bitter, so they should be stopped once golden brown.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, pepper, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, pepper, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes