Skip to main content
Main

Partridge Soup

A hearty soup made with partridges, ham, celery, onions, mutton shanks, and fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare

  1. Skin the partridges and cut them into pieces.

  2. Slice the ham, celery, and onions.

  3. Fry all ingredients in butter until browned, being careful not to burn them.

Make the soup

  1. Transfer to a stew pan with boiling water, peppercorns, mutton shanks, and salt.

  2. Stew gently for 2 hours.

  3. Strain through a sieve.

  4. Return the liquid to the stew pan with stewed celery and fried bread.

  5. Heat until near boiling. Skim.

Serve

  1. Serve hot in a tureen.

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. Celery + oniontop 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
Provide the main meat and flavour of the soup.
Mutton shanks
Add rich, savoury body to the broth during the long stew.
Onions
Browning in butter builds sweetness and savoury depth in the base.
Ham
Adds salty, smoky savouriness that seasons the broth.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the vegetables and meat, adding aroma.

The step that matters

Fry all ingredients in butter until browned, being careful not to burn them.. Browning builds deep savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, but scorched butter and solids turn bitter and can taint the whole soup, so heat must stay moderate.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, onion, butter, 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 ham, onion, butter, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes