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Squirrel Soup

A hearty soup made from quartered squirrels, vegetables, and thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and lima beans work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 222 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Squirrel Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer

  1. Wash and quarter the squirrels.

  2. Place them in a pot with salt and cold water.

  3. Cover and simmer gently on the back of the stove.

  4. Add vegetables like corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and Lima beans.

Strain and thicken

  1. Strain the soup through a coarse colander when the meat is tender.

  2. Return the liquid to the pot and thicken with butter and flour.

  3. Chop celery and parsley leaves and add if desired.

Serve

  1. Toast the bread, cut into dice, and fry in butter.

  2. Place the fried bread in a tureen and pour the hot soup over it.

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. Corn + lima beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together222 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Corn + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together938 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  4. Corn + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  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

Squirrels
Provide the meat, which becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the broth as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavour to the thickened soup and fried bread.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour. Flour only thickens when its starch is heated in the liquid. Stir it in evenly and keep the soup hot so the starch swells fully, otherwise the soup stays thin or turns lumpy.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, potato, lima beans, butter, flour, bread):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, potato, lima beans, butter, flour, bread. 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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