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Grouse Soup

A soup made by stewing grouse with onion, cloves, sweet herbs, mace, lemon peel, and brown stock, thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Grouse Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the grouse

  1. Pick and draw the grouse, removing the meat from the breast and cutting off the legs.

Make the soup

  1. Place the bodies in a stewpan with the onion, cloves, sweet herbs, mace, lemon peel, and brown stock.

  2. Stew until the meat falls off the bones.

  3. Boil the raspings with the bones.

  4. If the soup is not thick enough, add a mixture of flour and butter.

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. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

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

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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

Grouse
Provides the main meat and flavour of the soup.
Brown stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.
Raspings
Breadcrumbs that help thicken the soup as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the soup when mixed with butter and added at the end.

The step that matters

Stewing the bodies until the meat falls off the bones. Gentle, lengthy simmering extracts gelatin and flavour from the bones and connective tissue. Rushing it or boiling hard leaves the broth weak and the meat tough.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, lemon, flour, butter):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, lemon, flour, 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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