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Brown Soup

A hearty beef soup with bacon, onions, carrot, turnips, herbs, and browned steaks, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Brown Soup

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 ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Score the beef.

  2. Place the beef in a pot with 3 gallons of water.

  3. Add bacon, onions, carrot, turnips, and sweet herbs.

  4. Boil for 3 hours on moderate heat until reduced and flavorful.

Brown the steaks

  1. Cut the remaining beef into small steaks.

  2. Season the steaks with mixed spices.

  3. Dredge the steaks in flour.

  4. Melt butter in a frying pan.

  5. Heat until dark brown.

  6. Add the steaks to the pan.

  7. Brown the steaks on both sides until crisp.

  8. Remove the steaks from the pan.

  9. Drain the steaks from the butter.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the steaks to the soup with more spices and salt.

  2. Boil the soup for 45 minutes.

  3. Strain the soup through a sieve.

  4. Skim off the fat.

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

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

  4. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 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

Beef
Provides the main flavor and body of the broth as it simmers.
Bacon
Adds smoky, savory fat that enriches the flavor of the broth.
Flour
Coats the steaks so they brown more evenly and develop a crisp crust.
Butter
Conducts heat in the frying pan and helps the steaks brown and crisp.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth as they cook down.

The step that matters

Brown the steaks on both sides until crisp. Dredged steaks can burn before they brown if the butter is too hot or the pan is overcrowded. Browning builds the Maillard flavors that deepen the soup, so the crust should be deep but not black.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, turnip, flour, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, turnip, flour, butter. 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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