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Brown Vegetable Soup

A hearty soup made with water, bread, cabbage, carrots, turnip, onions, potatoes, parsley, salt, pepper, and oil or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brown Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Heat the oil or butter in a large saucepan and fry a slice of onion until brown but not burnt.

  2. Add 2 quarts of water, salt, pepper, the toasted slice of bread, and the chopped vegetables.

  3. Simmer for 3 to 4 hours.

Finish and adjust

  1. Mash the vegetables through a colander or with a spoon in the saucepan and simmer for another 10 minutes.

  2. If the soup is too thick, add more water and boil for 10 minutes.

  3. If the soup is too thin, boil uncovered until thickened.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 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

Potatoes
Break down when mashed, adding body and thickening the soup.
Bread
Adds body and helps thicken the soup as it simmers.
Onions
Browning in the hot fat builds a sweeter, deeper flavour base.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body as they soften during the long simmer.
Cabbage
Softens over long simmering and contributes to the soup's body and flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the onion. Browning onion in fat develops rich, sweet flavours through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. Burnt onion turns bitter and spoils the whole pot, so heat should be moderate and watched closely.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, carrot, turnip, onion, potato, parsley, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, carrot, turnip, onion, potato, parsley, 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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