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Brown Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with water, bread, cabbage, carrots, turnip, onions, potatoes, parsley, salt, pepper, and oil or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brown Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat the oil or butter in a large saucepan and fry a slice of onion until brown but not burnt.

  2. Add 2 quarts of water, salt, pepper, the toasted bread, and the chopped vegetables.

Simmer and finish

  1. Boil for 3 to 4 hours.

  2. Mash the vegetables through a colander or with a spoon.

  3. Boil for another 10 minutes.

  4. If the soup is too thick, add more water and boil for an additional 10 minutes.

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

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

  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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Break down during long boiling to thicken the soup and give it body.
Onions
Browning in the hot fat adds deeper, savoury flavour to the broth.
Toasted bread
Adds body and helps thicken the soup as it cooks.
Cabbage
Long simmering softens its fibres and adds mild, sweet vegetable flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the onion until brown but not burnt. Browning the onion in fat builds deep, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Burnt onion turns bitter and can taint the whole pot, so keep the heat moderate and watch closely.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, carrot, turnip, onion, potato, parsley, 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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