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Rich Brown Soup

A slow‑cooked beef soup flavored with cloves, mace, nutmeg, onions, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Rich Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stir the beef with the cloves and season with salt, pepper, mace, and nutmeg.

  2. Fry the sliced onions in butter and spread them over the meat.

Stew and finish

  1. Place the meat in a stew pot, pour in the water, and stew very slowly for 5 to 6 hours.

  2. Once the meat is shredded, strain and return the liquid to the pot.

  3. Add the claret or port wine and simmer slowly for about 30 minutes.

  4. When the soup is reduced to 3 quarts, it is done.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Lean fresh beef
Provides the meat that becomes shredded and flavours the broth as it stews.
Onions
Frying in butter adds sweetness and browned flavour to the soup.
Claret or port wine
Adds acidity and fruity depth to the broth during the final simmer.
Cloves
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the meat.

The step that matters

Stew very slowly for 5 to 6 hours. Gentle, long heat breaks down the tough connective tissue in lean beef so it becomes tender and shreds. Boiling hard would toughen the muscle fibres and leave the meat stringy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, clove, pepper, nutmeg, onion, butter, port wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, clove, pepper, nutmeg, onion, butter, port wine. 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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