Skip to main content
Main

Game Soup

Soup of game birds, calves' feet, ham, celery, herbs, butter and flour, finished with force-meat balls, yolks, currant jelly, wine, nutmeg, citrus, and bread rolls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pheasant and quail share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 48 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Game Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Clean and pluck the game birds, then cut them into pieces.

  2. Place the bird pieces in a soup pot with the calves' feet, ham, celery, and chopped sweet herbs.

  3. Add enough water to cover the ingredients and bring to a boil, skimming off any foam.

  4. Once the meat is loose from the bones, strain the liquid into a clean pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the soup with fresh butter rolled in flour.

  2. Add the fried force-meat balls or hard-boiled yolks, currant jelly, wine with grated nutmeg, orange or lemon juice, and grated lemon peel.

  3. Bring the soup to a boil again and serve with bread rolls.

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. Pheasant + quailtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Ham + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Quail + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Pheasant + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together225 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Game birds (in the method)
Provide the main meaty flavour that gives the soup its character.
Calves' feet
Release gelatin into the liquid, giving the soup body and a silky mouthfeel.
Butter and flour
Thicken the soup into a smoother, richer consistency when cooked together.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity depth that balances the savoury stock.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich, meaty broth.
Orange or lemon juice
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and cuts through richness.

The step that matters

Skimming the foam while the stock boils. Foam carries impurities and fat that would make the soup cloudy and greasy, so removing it early keeps the broth clear and clean-tasting.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, quail, ham, butter, flour, meat, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, quail, ham, butter, flour, meat, egg. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes