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Broth Maigre, or Broth Without Meat

A clear broth made with onions, carrots, turnip, and optional rice or barley, seasoned with pepper and salt.

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

Broth Maigre, or Broth Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stewpan, brown the sliced onions with the butter and flour over medium heat until soft and rich brown.

  2. Add the cold water, sliced carrot, turnip, and rice or pot barley if using.

  3. Boil for 1 hour, then add the boiling water.

  4. Boil for an additional 30 minutes and season with pepper and salt.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

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

  5. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browning them builds the deep, rich color and savory flavor of the broth.
Butter or dripping
Carries the heat for browning the onions and adds richness.
Flour
Lightly thickens the broth as the onions brown in the fat.
Rice or pot barley
Optional grain that releases starch, adding body and thickness to the broth.

The step that matters

Browning the onions. Onions must brown slowly until soft and deep in color. Pale onions give a thin, bland broth, while scorched ones turn bitter. The browned fat and flour also build the broth's flavor and body.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, carrot, turnip, rice, pepper. 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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