Skip to main content
Main

A Fkench Vegetable Broth

A broth made from diced cabbage, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, cooked with butter or dripping, simmered, and seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

A Fkench Vegetable Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and dice the cabbage, carrot, turnip, celery, and onion.

Make the broth

  1. In a frying pan, combine the vegetables with butter or dripping, cover, and cook slowly for 30 minutes.

  2. After 30 minutes, add 1 pint of hot water and simmer for 2 hours until tender.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, then add 1 pint of boiling water and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve with croutons of fried bread.

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 + 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. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter or dripping
Fat that softens the vegetables gently and adds richness to the broth.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens and browns slightly.
Carrot
Contributes natural sweetness and body to the broth.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savoury flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Cooking the vegetables slowly in fat. Cooking the vegetables gently and covered in fat softens them and draws out their flavour without browning them too hard. Rushing this with high heat can scorch the vegetables and make the broth taste bitter.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, onion, butter, pepper, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, onion, butter, pepper, bread. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes