Name: Brown Soup
Ingredients: 1 teaspoon extract of meat; 1 pint water or weak homemade leaf tea; 2 tablespoons minced vegetables

Why it works: Meat and tea work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 207 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

1 teaspoon extract of meat
1 pint water or weak homemade leaf tea
2 tablespoons minced vegetables

Directions

Make the stock

In a pot, combine 1 teaspoon of extract of meat with 1 pint of water or weak homemade leaf tea.
Bring the mixture to a boil to create a thin stock.

Add vegetables and simmer

Add 2 tablespoons of minced vegetables to the stock.
Simmer for a few minutes until the vegetables are tender.

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.

Meat + teatop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together207 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Extract of meat: Provides concentrated savory flavor that gives the thin stock its meaty character.
Water or leaf tea: Forms the liquid base that dissolves the extract and carries its flavor.
Minced vegetables: Add flavor and soften during simmering, becoming tender in the broth.

“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.