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Brown Soup

A beef bone broth simmered with onions, carrot, turnip, peppercorns, mace, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Brown Soup

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the hough into smaller pieces.

  2. Grease the bottom of a clean pan with a little marrow.

Make the broth

  1. Add the hough pieces to the pan and stew gently for 1 hour.

  2. Fill the pot to the brim with cold water.

  3. Boil for a whole day, adding sawed bones on top.

  4. Add the onions, carrot, turnip, whole peppercorns, mace, and cloves.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Hough (beef)
Provides meat and connective tissue that break down into gelatin, giving the broth body.
Sawed bones (in the method)
Release collagen and minerals over long simmering, adding richness and body to the broth.
Onions
Contribute savory sweetness and aromatic depth as they cook down into the broth.

The step that matters

Keep the broth at a gentle simmer. A hard boil over a long cooking time makes the broth cloudy and can emulsify fat into it. Gentle heat lets collagen convert to gelatin slowly while keeping the liquid clear.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, turnip, clove. 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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