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Brown Soup

A hearty vegetable soup made with cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, French beans, parsnips, green peas, onions, and dripping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Brown Soup

Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and cut the cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and any other vegetables into small pieces.

  2. Cut the onions into rings and fry them brown in a large saucepan with the dripping.

Make the soup

  1. Add the water and bring it to a boil.

  2. Once boiling, add the vegetables, sweet herbs, parsley, pepper, and salt.

  3. Let the mixture boil for three to four hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Rub the soup through a sieve or colander, then return it to the saucepan and boil for five minutes.

  2. Optionally, add a little catsup or spice and serve with slices of toasted bread.

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. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 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

Onions
Frying them brown adds sweetness and deep color to the broth.
Potatoes
Break down during long boiling, adding body and thickening the soup.
Carrots
Release sweetness and color into the broth during the long simmer.
Cabbage
Softens over long boiling, adding bulk and mild flavor to the soup.

The step that matters

Rubbing the soup through a sieve. Pressing the cooked vegetables through a sieve breaks them down so the soup becomes smooth and thick. Skipping or rushing this step leaves a coarse, watery texture.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, carrot, turnip, potato, beans, parsnip, onion):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, carrot, turnip, potato, beans, parsnip, onion. 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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