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Brown Soup

A hearty soup made with beef dripping, vegetables, stock, catsup, and herbs, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Brown Soup

Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the beef dripping in a pot over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped vegetables and fry until browned, stirring to prevent burning.

  3. Pour in the hot stock and simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Pass the mixture through a sieve to remove solids.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the catsup and browning sauce.

  2. Season with pepper and salt.

  3. Thicken the soup with a little flour.

  4. Bring the soup to a boil.

  5. Serve with toast or 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.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 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

Beef dripping
Provides fat for frying the vegetables and carries their flavour through the soup.
Onion
Browning in the fat builds savoury, deeper flavour in the finished soup.
Flour
Thickens the stock, giving the soup body.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup.
Browning sauce
Adds colour to the soup, giving it its brown appearance.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables until browned. Browning the vegetables in fat caramelises their sugars and proteins, building deep savoury flavour; stirring prevents scorching, which would make the soup taste bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, celery, flour, turnip, thyme, parsley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, celery, flour, turnip, thyme, parsley. 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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