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Game Soup

A hearty soup made with rabbits, lamb, beef, onions, celery, and fried bread, simmered slowly over water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and lamb share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 51 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Game Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Joint the rabbits neatly.

  2. Cut the lamb and onions into small pieces.

  3. Fry the lamb, onions, and rabbits in butter until light brown.

Make the soup

  1. Place the fried mixture into a soup pot with the beef cut into strips.

  2. Add a little pepper.

  3. Pour in the water.

  4. Heat slowly.

  5. Stew gently for 2 hours.

  6. Remove the meat pieces and cover them in a bowl.

  7. Cook the soup for an additional hour.

  8. Strain the soup and cool it.

  9. Add the celery and simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup over fried bread in a tureen.

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. Rabbit + lambtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Lamb + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together896 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  5. Bread + buttertop 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

Rabbits
Provide the main meat flavour and body to the soup as they stew.
Lean lamb
Adds savoury depth and richness to the broth through long gentle stewing.
Lean beef
Contributes meaty flavour and gelatin-rich body to the stock during slow simmering.
Onions
Browning in butter builds sweet, savoury aromatic flavour that carries into the broth.
White celery
Adds a fresh, aromatic vegetal note near the end of cooking.

The step that matters

Fry the meat and onions until light brown. Browning in butter creates Maillard flavour compounds that give the finished broth depth. Pale frying yields a flatter, blander soup, while overbrowning can make it bitter.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, lamb, onion, beef, bread, butter, pepper):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, lamb, onion, beef, bread, butter, 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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