Skip to main content
Main

Game Soup

A soup made from pheasant, partridges or grouse, ham, vegetables, herbs, spices, and wine, simmered and thickened with bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Game Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Break up the bones of the game birds and cover them with cold stock.

  2. Add sliced vegetables, herbs, spices, and diced ham.

  3. Boil until the bones are dry and the meat can be rubbed through a sieve.

Finish the soup

  1. After sieving, mix in fine bread-crumbs equal to the meat's bulk and season with powdered herbs, salt, and pepper.

  2. Pound the mixture to a paste.

  3. Add the soup, adjusting with more stock until it resembles cream.

  4. Boil with a few drops of lemon juice.

  5. Stir in wine 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pheasant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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)
Their meat and bones give the soup its main flavour and body.
Fine bread-crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the mixture, giving it a smoother, creamier texture.
Diced ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the stock as it simmers.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, meaty flavour.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma that lift the finished soup.

The step that matters

Boil until the bones are dry and the meat can be rubbed through a sieve. Simmering long enough extracts flavour from the bones and softens the meat so it passes through the sieve smoothly. Stopping early leaves the soup thin and gritty.

“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 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes