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Brown Soup

A vegetable and beef dripping soup thickened with flour and seasoned with catsup, pepper, and sea salt.

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

Make the soup

  1. Melt the beef dripping in a pot over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped vegetables and fry until browned, stirring to prevent burning.

  3. Pour in the hot stock and simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Strain the mixture through a sieve into a clean pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the catsup.

  2. Stir in the browning.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Thicken the soup with a little flour.

  5. Bring to a boil.

  6. Serve with toast or fried 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. 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 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

Beef dripping
Carries the flavour of the frying and browns the vegetables.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it heats, giving it body.
Onion
Browns during frying, adding savoury sweetness to the stock.
Catsup
Adds sweetness and acidity to the broth.

The step that matters

Frying the vegetables until browned. Stirring prevents scorching, which would make the soup bitter. Properly browned vegetables, through the Maillard reaction, add deep colour and savoury flavour to the finished broth.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, celery, flour, turnip, clove, 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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