Skip to main content
Baking

Browning for Clear Soup

A brown syrup made from water, sugar, and butter used to flavor clear soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Browning for Clear Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the browning

  1. Combine water, sugar, and butter in a small frying pan and heat over medium heat.

  2. Stir until it reaches your desired brown tint.

  3. Add ½ pint of water and boil.

Store and use

  1. Skim off any impurities and let it cool.

  2. Bottle and cork for future use.

  3. Add a little of this browning to your soup before the three hours of simmering.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Caramelizes as it heats, creating the brown colour and a deeper caramel flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a mellow flavour to the caramelized sugar.

The step that matters

Stir until the desired brown tint. Sugar darkens quickly once it starts to caramelize. Going too far turns it bitter and burnt-tasting, and it can't be reversed, so watch the colour closely and stop as soon as it matches your target.

“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

Delicate CakeDelicate Cake246 recipesBoiled FrostingBoiled Frosting69 recipesCitron CakeCitron Cake68 recipesScotch CakeScotch Cake63 recipes