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Game Soup

A hearty soup made from leftover partridge meat, bones, vegetables, and stock, thickened with butter and flour and served with fried bread dice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Game Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Pick off the meat from the leftover partridge and break up the bones.

  2. Place the meat, bones, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, peppercorns, and parsley in a saucepan.

  3. Add enough common stock to cover the ingredients and boil gently for several hours.

Prepare the meat

  1. Pound the saved meat with any scraps from the bones.

  2. Moisten the meat with some soup.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve into the strained soup.

Finish and serve

  1. Bring the soup to a boil, thicken with butter rolled in flour, and serve with fried bread dice.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 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

Partridge meat
Provides the main flavour and, once pounded and sieved, body to the soup.
Partridge bones
Release gelatin and savoury flavour into the stock during long simmering.
Butter and flour
Form a roux-style thickener that gives the soup a smoother, fuller body.

The step that matters

Simmering the stock gently. Boiling hard rather than simmering can cloud the stock and push fat into it, so keep it at a gentle simmer for the full several hours.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, clove, butter):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Marjoramfits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, clove, 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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