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Brown Vegetable Soup

A hearty vegetable soup with onions, cucumber, radish, potatoes, celery greens, stale bread, and broth, served with plain bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and radish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 212 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Brown Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a pan, melt a little butter and fry the onions, cucumber, lobak, and potatoes until lightly browned and soft.

  2. Add the celery greens and stale bread crusts to the pan.

  3. Pour in the broth and water, then season with pepper and salt.

  4. Once the vegetables are soft, remove a spoonful and mash the rest through a colander back into the pan.

  5. Stir in the mashed vegetables and reheat the soup.

Serve

  1. Add Worcestershire sauce or Bovril if desired, and serve with squares of plain 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.

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. Cucumber + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Potato + porktop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Potato + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 recipes

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

  5. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Break down when cooked and mashed, giving the soup body and thickness.
Onions
Soften and brown in butter, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the base.
Stale bread crusts
Absorb liquid and thicken the soup as they cook down.
Broth
Provides the main liquid and savoury flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Mashing through a colander. Once the vegetables are soft, pressing them through a colander breaks them into a smooth purée that thickens the soup. Leaving them in chunks gives a coarser, thinner texture.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, cucumber, radish, potato, butter, bread, pork):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, cucumber, radish, potato, butter, bread, pork. 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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