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Bouillon De Gibier

Bouillon de Gibier is a broth made from game birds, bacon, water, salt, pepper, nutmeg, served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Quail and pheasant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 48 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Bouillon De Gibier

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Cut up the game birds as if preparing for roasting.

  2. Place the game and bacon in a large stewpan.

  3. Add 4 to 8 cups of water and let it stew for 3 to 4 hours.

Make the soup

  1. Remove the game and serve with some of the sauce.

  2. To the remaining broth, add 5 to 6 cups of hot water, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Simmer for 15 minutes to create a good soup.

  4. Serve the soup with rice.

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. Quail + pheasanttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Quail + ricetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Game birds
Their meat and bones release flavour and body into the broth during long stewing.
Bacon
Its rendered fat adds savoury richness to the broth.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic note to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 3 to 4 hours. Long, slow stewing draws flavour and body from the birds into the water. A gentle simmer keeps the meat tender and the broth clear, while a hard boil can make the meat stringy and the broth cloudy.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quail, pheasant, pepper, rice):

  1. Celeryfits about as well
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, pheasant, pepper, rice. 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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