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Squirrel Soup

A soup made by simmering squirrels with water, salt, vegetables, and thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Squirrel Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the squirrels in a pot with cold water and salt.

  2. Cover and bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the meat is tender.

  3. Add any available vegetables.

  4. Once the meat is very tender, remove the bones.

Finish

  1. Thicken the soup by mixing butter with flour to form a paste, then stir it in.

  2. Season to taste.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Squirrels
Provide the meat that becomes tender during the long simmer, flavouring the broth.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the broth, rounding out its flavour.
Flour
Thickens the broth when cooked into a paste with butter and stirred in.

The step that matters

Simmering until the meat is tender. Squirrel meat is lean and tough, so it needs a gentle, prolonged simmer to become tender. Boiling hard can toughen the proteins and leave the meat chewy, so the heat should be reduced once the soup comes to a boil.

“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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