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Game Soup

A soup made from finely chopped game meat, bones, turnips, onion, and seasoned with cayenne, nutmeg, salt, and thickened with egg yolks and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Game Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and gravy

  1. Chop the game meat finely and pound it with a bit of butter.

  2. Break the bones and stew them in broth to make gravy.

  3. In the gravy, boil the turnips and onion until thoroughly cooked.

Make the soup

  1. Squeeze the cooked turnips and onion through a tamis into the pounded meat.

  2. Season the mixture with cayenne, nutmeg, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Gradually add the gravy to the mixture, keeping it on the side of the stewpan without boiling.

  4. Beat the egg yolks with the cream until well combined.

  5. As the soup is about to boil, stir in the egg and cream mixture, allowing it to thicken without boiling.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Turnip + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Game meat
Forms the body of the soup, giving it its rich, meaty flavour and substance.
Turnips
Cooked and pushed through a tamis, they thicken the soup and add body and mild sweetness.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup gently when stirred in off the boil, giving it a smooth, velvety texture.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the flavour and helping the soup feel smooth.

The step that matters

Thickening the egg and cream mixture. Egg yolks set when heated, so if the soup boils after the yolks go in they can curdle and turn grainy. Keeping it just below boiling lets them thicken it smoothly.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, onion, pepper, nutmeg, egg, cream):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, onion, pepper, nutmeg, egg, cream. 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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