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Brown Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with water, bread, cabbage, carrots, turnip, onions, potatoes, parsley, salt, pepper, and oil or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brown Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the oil or butter in a large saucepan and fry a slice of onion until brown but not burnt.

  2. Add 2 quarts of water, salt, pepper, the toasted slice of bread, and the chopped vegetables.

  3. Simmer for 3 to 4 hours.

  4. Mash the vegetables through a colander or with a spoon in the saucepan.

  5. Simmer for another 10 minutes.

  6. If the soup is too thick, add more water and boil for 10 minutes.

  7. If the soup is too thin, boil uncovered until thickened.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 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

Potatoes
Break down when simmered and mashed, giving the soup body and thickness.
Onions
Browning in the fat builds sweetness and savoury depth in the soup base.
Carrots
Soften during long simmering, adding sweetness and body to the soup.
Cabbage
Softens during long simmering, adding bulk and a mild sweetness.
Bread
Toasted bread adds starch that helps thicken the soup.

The step that matters

Browning the onion slice. Frying until brown but not burnt develops savoury flavour through browning; burnt onion turns bitter and spoils the whole pot.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, carrot, turnip, onion, potato, parsley, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, carrot, turnip, onion, potato, parsley, pepper. 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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