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Brown Soup

A hearty beef bone broth 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. Rub the bottom of a clean pot with a little marrow.

Make the broth

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

  2. Fill the pot to the brim with cold water and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the bones, onions, carrot, turnip, peppercorns, salt, mace, and cloves.

  4. Let it boil for a whole day.

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 the meat and connective tissue that give the broth its body and savory flavor.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth as they cook down into the broth.
Cold water
Serves as the cooking liquid that extracts flavor and gelatin from the meat and bones.

The step that matters

Let it boil for a whole day. A long, steady simmer is needed to slowly draw gelatin and flavor from the bones and meat. Boiling too hard for too long can make the broth cloudy and greasy, so keep it at a gentle simmer.

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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