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Brown Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with carrots, onions, turnip, and stock, thickened with flour and flavored with thyme, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Brown Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Heat the dripping in a pan over medium heat until it releases a blue vapor.

  2. Add the flour and stir until it turns dark brown.

  3. Pour in the stock and bring to a simmer.

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Clean and finely mince the vegetables.

  2. Stick the cloves into a piece of carrot.

Simmer and serve

  1. Add the carrot and cloves along with the thyme, pepper, and salt to taste.

  2. Remove any scum that rises.

  3. Simmer for one hour.

  4. Place the parsley in a serving tureen.

  5. Remove all fat from the soup.

  6. Pour the soup into the tureen.

  7. 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.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the soup, and cooking it in fat to dark brown adds color and nutty flavor.
Dripping
Fat that carries flavor and forms the base for browning the flour.
Stock
Forms the liquid base and gives the soup its body and savoury depth.
Onions
Add aroma and sweetness as they soften during simmering.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body as they soften during simmering.
White turnip
Adds mild sweetness and earthy flavor as it cooks down into the soup.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the fat. Flour must be stirred over steady heat until dark brown. Too little cooking leaves a raw, pasty taste, while too much heat or time turns it bitter and burnt, spoiling the whole soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, clove, flour, turnip, thyme, pepper, parsley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, clove, flour, turnip, thyme, pepper, parsley. 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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