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Consomme Brunoise

A clear vegetable consommé with finely diced vegetables, butter, and optional lettuce or sorrel, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Consomme Brunoise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Peel the onion and wash the carrots, turnip, and leek.

  2. Cut all vegetables into very small dice.

Make the consomme

  1. In a stewpan, combine the vegetables and butter, then season with a little salt, pepper, and sugar.

  2. Cover and cook over low heat for a few minutes, shaking the pan to prevent burning.

  3. Pour in the clear soup and gently boil for about 30 minutes.

  4. Skim off any fat and serve with toasted bread and optional lettuce and sorrel.

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Carrots
Provide sweetness and colour, and a diced texture that holds up in the clear soup.
Butter
Carries flavour and gives the vegetables a rich, moist texture as they cook gently.
Leek
Adds a mild onion-like aroma and sweetness to the broth.
Turnip
Adds a mildly sweet, earthy flavour and firm texture to the diced vegetables.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables covered over low heat, shaking the pan. Gentle covered heat softens and flavours the vegetables in their own moisture and butter. Too much heat or no shaking lets the diced pieces scorch on the base of the pan, which adds bitter, burnt flavours to the clear soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, leek, butter, sugar, pepper, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, leek, butter, sugar, pepper, bread. 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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