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Game Soup

Game Soup is a hearty broth made from game meat, turnips, onion, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Game Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and gravy

  1. Chop the game meat finely and pound it with a bit of butter.

  2. Break the bones and stew them in broth to make gravy.

  3. Boil the turnips and onion in the gravy until thoroughly cooked.

  4. Squeeze the cooked vegetables through a fine sieve into the pounded meat.

  5. Season the mixture with cayenne, nutmeg, and coarse sea salt.

  6. Gradually add the gravy to the seasoned mixture.

Thicken and finish

  1. Place the mixture in a stewpan on low heat, avoiding boiling.

  2. Beat the egg yolks with the cream until well combined.

  3. Stir the egg and cream mixture into the soup as it approaches a boil, thickening it but preventing boiling to avoid curdling.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Turnip + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Game meat
Provides the main body and rich flavour of the soup.
Turnips
Cook down and break up through the sieve to add body and mild sweetness.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup as they gently set with heat.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness, and helps keep the yolks silky when combined.

The step that matters

Adding the egg and cream mixture. Egg yolks thicken when warmed gently but curdle if the soup boils. Keeping the heat low as the mixture approaches a boil lets the yolks thicken it smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, butter, turnip, pepper, nutmeg, egg, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, butter, turnip, pepper, nutmeg, egg, cream. 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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