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Brown Soup

A brown vegetable soup made with onions, turnip, carrot, potatoes, butter, flour, and Marmite.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Brown Soup

Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan over medium heat.

  2. Add the sliced vegetables and stir for 10 minutes until browned.

  3. Add the flour and cook for a minute until slightly browned.

  4. Dissolve the MARMITE in the hot water and gradually add it to the vegetables.

  5. Let the mixture simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  6. Pass the soup through a fine sieve.

  7. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and reboil before serving.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion, turnip, carrot and potatoes
Form the body of the soup and, once cooked and sieved, thicken it with starch and texture.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the vegetables and helps them brown in the pan.
Flour
Cooks with the butter to form a roux that thickens the soup.
Marmite
Adds deep savoury, salty umami flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables. Stirring the vegetables until they brown builds rich, roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale vegetables give a flatter soup, so they should colour well before the liquid goes in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, potato, butter, flour, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, potato, butter, flour, 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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