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Brown Soup

A beef soup with carrots, onion, celery, turnip, and seasonings, simmered for hours and thickened with flour.

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 celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dry the pot thoroughly and add the sugar, letting it brown.

  2. Add the butter and marrow from the bone, heating until smoking hot.

  3. Cut the meat and vegetables into small pieces and fry until browned.

Simmer and finish

  1. Add the water and bring to a boil, cooking for 4 hours.

  2. Strain the soup and mix in the flour moistened with water.

  3. Return to the saucepan, stir over heat until it boils, season, and serve.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  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

Beef leg
Provides meat flavor and body as it browns and simmers into the broth.
Sugar
Browns in the dry pot to create caramel color and a deeper, sweeter flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor as it heats and helps the meat and vegetables brown.
Flour
Thickens the strained soup once stirred in and brought to a boil.

The step that matters

Browning the sugar in the dry pot. Sugar darkens quickly once it starts to caramelize, and past that point it turns bitter and can scorch the pot, so it should be watched closely and stopped at a deep amber.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, celery, turnip, sugar, pepper, 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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