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Brown Onion Soup

A savory soup made with onions, leeks, carrots, ham, and stock, finished with browned flour and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 360 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Brown Onion Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. In a pan, heat the clarified fat and add the ham strips.

  2. Once hot, add the sliced onions, leeks, carrots, and sugar; stir until browned.

  3. Pour in the hot stock, bring to a boil, and skim off any foam.

  4. Add the peppercorns, cloves, bay leaf, and thyme; boil down to a pulp.

  5. Pass the mixture through a sieve back into the pan.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the browned flour and salt to taste; add more stock if needed for thickness.

  2. Bring to a boil again and serve hot.

  3. Optionally, serve with grated cheese.

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. Leek + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Leek + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Caramelised by browning in fat, they give the soup its deep colour and sweet, savoury flavour.
Browned flour
Starch that thickens the stock as it heats, giving the soup body.
Leeks
Add mild onion-like sweetness and aroma to the base as they brown.
Raw ham
Renders fat and adds meaty, savoury depth to the browning base.
Stock
Forms the liquid body of the soup, carrying the flavours from the browned base.

The step that matters

Browning the onions and leeks. Onions must be stirred until well browned, because the Maillard reaction and caramelisation create the soup's colour and deep flavour; pale vegetables produce a flat, washed-out soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (leek, clove, thyme, ham, sugar, flour, carrot):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against leek, clove, thyme, ham, sugar, flour, carrot. 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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