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Clear Brown Soup

A clear soup made from stock, caramel, cloves, allspice, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Clear Brown Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Clear and color the stock

  1. Clear the stock as directed in the Amber Soup recipe.

  2. Stir in enough caramel to color the stock to your liking.

Make the caramel

  1. Heat granulated sugar in a saucepan until it bubbles brown to make caramel.

  2. Add boiling water, 1 tablespoon for each tablespoon of sugar.

  3. Stir until the caramel is dissolved.

Season the stock

  1. Add 6 cloves and 4 allspice to the stock.

  2. Strain them out before adding caramel.

Add onion flavor

  1. Grate a raw onion.

  2. Squeeze the onion juice into the heating stock for onion flavor.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Allspice + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sugar + allspicetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,938 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Caramel
Provides the brown color and a deep, slightly bittersweet flavor to the clear stock.
Onion
Adds a fresh, savory onion flavor to the stock through its juice.
Cloves
Contribute a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the stock while it steeps.
Allspice
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor that rounds out the stock.

The step that matters

Heat the sugar only until it bubbles brown. Sugar darkens quickly, and going past a rich brown turns it bitter and burnt. That bitterness would carry into the soup, so watch the color closely and stop at the right moment.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, clove, allspice):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, allspice. 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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