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Another Pheasant Soup

A soup made from pheasant stock, bread, pheasant breasts, mushrooms, butter, mace, cayenne, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Another Pheasant Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Boil down the half-roasted pheasants to make stock.

  2. Strain the stock and reheat it.

Make the soup base

  1. Pound the pheasant breasts with the soaked bread until smooth.

  2. In a pan, melt the butter and sauté the mushrooms for 10 to 15 minutes without browning.

  3. Add the sautéed mushrooms to the mortar and pound with the other ingredients.

  4. Combine the mixture with the strained stock and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried bread sippets or sippets d la Reine.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Bread + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  4. Pheasant + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  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

Pheasant breasts
Provide the main body and flavour, and when pounded with bread they thicken the soup.
Bread soaked in gravy
Adds body and thickens the soup as it breaks down when pounded.
Pheasant stock
Forms the liquid base that carries all the flavour of the soup.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and a tender texture to the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when used to cook the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Sautéing the mushrooms without browning. Mushrooms that brown take on a deeper, more bitter flavour and a different colour, which would change the pale, delicate soup. Gentle cooking in butter softens them while keeping them light.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, bread, mushroom, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, bread, mushroom, butter. 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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