Skip to main content
Main

Squirrel Soup

A hearty soup made from quartered squirrels simmered with vegetables and thickened with butter and flour, served with toasted bread cubes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Squirrel Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Place the quartered squirrels in a pot with ½ tablespoon of coarse sea salt and 1 gallon of cold water.

  2. Cover the pot and simmer gently on the back of the stove, avoiding a boil.

  3. Add corn, Irish potatoes, tomatoes, and Lima beans as desired.

  4. Once the meat has boiled to shreds, strain the soup through a coarse colander to remove bones.

  5. Return the strained soup to the pot and boil for a while longer.

Thicken and serve

  1. Thicken the soup by rubbing a piece of butter into flour and adding it to the pot.

  2. Add chopped celery and parsley leaves if desired.

  3. Toast 2 slices of bread, cut into ½ inch dice, and fry them in butter.

  4. Place the fried bread in a tureen and pour the hot soup over it.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Corn + lima beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together222 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  4. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  5. Corn + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together938 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 cooks down and flavours the broth.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter and stirred in.
Butter
Enriches the thickener and adds richness when fried bread is coated.
Lima beans
Add body and starch, making the soup heartier.
Irish potatoes
Release starch into the broth, adding body and substance.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup by rubbing a piece of butter into flour and adding it to the pot.. Rubbing butter into flour coats the flour particles so they disperse without lumping when added to hot liquid. Starch then thickens the soup as it heats.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, potato, tomato, butter, flour, celery, parsley):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, potato, tomato, butter, flour, celery, parsley. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipes