The oldest written broths
The oldest known culinary recipes in the world are on three clay tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, dating to no later than about 1730 BCE, written in Akkadian cuneiform and originating in southern Mesopotamia. The best-preserved of them, YBC 4644, contains 25 recipes for stews and broths.
The detail that undoes the usual framing: of those 25, twenty-one use meat and four don’t. One meatless recipe, pašrûtum, translates roughly as “unwinding,” built from water, fat, leek, coriander, garlic, and salt.
So the two traditions aren’t sequential, and they aren’t divided by class. Meat broths and vegetable broths appear side by side in the earliest cooking instructions we have, in the same collection, written by the same culture. Any history that presents bone broth as the ancient original and vegetable broth as a later substitute has the record backwards.
A note on Hippocrates
Bone broth articles routinely credit Hippocrates with prescribing bone decoctions to convalescents. There’s no basis for it that I could find. The convalescent food that runs through the Hippocratic writings is ptisan, a barley decoction, the centerpiece of Regimen in Acute Diseases.
The remedy was barley water. The misattribution is common enough that it’s become a stock line, which is a reason to be careful with any claim that puts a modern product in an ancient mouth.
How the two traditions developed
Both broths spread and specialized. Bone broths took on regional forms: Korean seolleongtang, simmered from ox bones until the liquid turns milky; Vietnamese pho, built on beef or chicken bones with charred onion and ginger; Japanese torigara, made from chicken carcasses. Vegetable broths did the same, absorbing whatever grew locally and whatever arrived by trade.
Medieval European monastic communities relied on vegetable broths during fasting periods, when meat was restricted, though still available. Useful correction to the peasant framing too: these were institutional kitchens making a deliberate choice.
By the nineteenth century, French cooking had formalized stock-making into a technical discipline. Consommé belongs to that tradition: a meat or poultry stock clarified with a raft of egg white and lean minced meat, producing a liquid that’s clear and intensely flavored. Not a vegetable stock, and not a light one.
What each one gives you
Bone broth supplies gelatin, some minerals, and free amino acids, mostly glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline, plus more protein than vegetable broth, which is its main nutritional advantage. It does not, however, deliver meaningful glutamine, despite how often the two get linked; the full reasoning is in the broth section of the 3-day guide.
Vegetable broth supplies potassium, some water-soluble vitamins, and the aromatic compounds that make it taste like something. Strained vegetable broth has no fiber worth counting, since the fiber stays in the strainer. Blend the vegetables into the liquid if you want the fiber.
Side by side: bone broth wins on protein and gelatin. Vegetable broth wins on potassium and vitamins, though long simmering degrades some of them. Neither delivers meaningful fiber or barrier repair at these doses, if strained. Flavor differs, and that’s the basis for choosing.
What a cup holds
Labels give a sense of scale. On one major brand’s labels, a cup of chicken bone broth lists 45 calories and 9 grams of protein, and the same brand’s regular chicken broth lists 5 calories, 1 gram of protein, and 520 milligrams of sodium. The label gives one number for a product that varies. A 2019 analysis of commercial and homemade bone broths found large differences in amino acid content from pot to pot, and concluded that bone broth is unlikely to supply reliable amounts of collagen precursors compared with supplements. A homemade vegetable broth, strained, sits near zero on energy and protein.
Using both
If you’re running a soup cleanse, alternating bone and vegetable broths across the three days is reasonable, and the reason is palate fatigue. Drinking the same liquid nine times is the thing that ends most cleanses.
A hybrid works too: simmer bones with vegetables and herbs, which is what most cooks have done for most of history anyway. The separation of the two categories is largely a modern retail distinction.
Time and storage
The two broths run on different clocks. The 3-day guide simmers bone broth for 12 to 24 hours and vegetable broth for 1 to 2 hours, which is why vegetable broth is the one people make on a weeknight. Both follow the same food-safety rule. The USDA gives cooked soup 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator and 2 to 3 months in the freezer, and a big pot cools fastest in shallow containers.
Broths to know
Seolleongtang, Korea. Ox bones simmered long enough that the broth goes opaque and white. Traditionally served with rice and salt on the side so each person seasons their own.
Caldo de res, Mexico. Beef and bone with corn, squash, and cabbage. Widely eaten during postpartum recovery, a long-standing cultural custom, described here without any claim about hormones behind it.
Rasam, South India. Thin, sour, and peppery with tamarind and black pepper, eaten after or alongside a heavier meal. One of the few traditional broths whose stated purpose, aiding digestion, matches what a thin warm sour liquid plausibly does.
Rosół, Poland. Clear chicken broth, Sunday food, and the standard thing served to someone who is ill. The fuller story, including its seventeenth-century written record, is in History & benefits.
Every food culture that has had a pot has arrived at some version of this. That convergence is the strongest argument for broth, and it doesn’t require a mechanism.
Choosing
Pick on flavor and on what you have. Bones if you want body and protein, vegetables if you want brightness and speed, both if you have the time. The history doesn’t favor one, and neither does the evidence.
Common questions
- Is bone broth healthier than vegetable broth?
- Bone broth carries more protein, about 9 grams a cup on one label against 1 gram for regular broth, and its protein varies from pot to pot. The history and the evidence favor neither.
- How long do you simmer each broth?
- The 3-day guide simmers bone broth for 12 to 24 hours and vegetable broth for 1 to 2 hours.
- How long does homemade broth keep?
- The USDA gives cooked soup 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator and 2 to 3 months in the freezer.