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Partridge Soup

A soup made with partridges, ham, onion, celery, mutton shank, and butter, simmered in water and seasoned with peppercorns and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Partridge Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and brown the partridges, ham, onion, and celery without burning.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a stewpan and add water, white peppercorns, and the shank of mutton.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt to taste and bring to a boil, then skim the surface clean.

  4. Reduce heat and simmer.

  5. Strain the soup.

Serve

  1. Add stewed celery and fried bread 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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

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

  5. Ham + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Give the soup its main meaty flavour as they brown and simmer.
Butter
Carries fat for browning the meat and vegetables, adding richness and aroma.
Onion
Browns to add sweetness and savoury depth to the broth.
Shank of mutton
Releases collagen and flavour into the water during long simmering, enriching the broth.
Lean ham
Adds a salty, savoury meat flavour that deepens the broth.

The step that matters

Brown the partridges, ham, onion, and celery without burning. Browning builds savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, but burnt fats and sugars turn bitter and can taint the whole soup, so the pan needs watching.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, ham, mutton, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, ham, mutton, 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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