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Menu for a Dinner of Six

A soup made from minced snipe meat, butter, flour, port, red currant jelly, lime juice, and boiled cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Menu for a Dinner of Six

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cool the bones in a bowl.

  2. Pass the saved snipe meat through a mincing machine and pound it to a paste, using a little soup.

Make the soup

  1. Skim any fat from the soup and heat it in a saucepan with butter.

  2. Stir in flour to make a smooth paste, then gradually add the soup and snipe paste, stirring continuously.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil to thicken.

  4. Add port, red currant jelly, and lime juice.

Finish and serve

  1. In a cup, break the raw egg and save the yolk; mix it with a little soup and strain into a tureen.

  2. Pour the hot soup over the strained egg and serve.

  3. For extra richness, stir in boiling cream before serving.

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

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

  2. Red currant + limetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + limetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Snipe meat
Provides the main meaty flavour and body of the soup.
Butter
Enriches the flavour and helps form the smooth thickening base.
Flour
Thickens the soup into a smooth, velvety body.
Port
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour through its wine character.
Raw egg
Enriches the soup's texture and richness when the yolk is added.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and a silkier mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk to the hot soup. If the egg is poured into soup that is too hot or added without first being mixed with a little soup, it can scramble and turn grainy. Tempering it with a small amount of soup first gently warms the yolk so it blends smoothly.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, flour, red currant, egg, cream):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, flour, red currant, 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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