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Game Soup

Soup made from roast bird remains, onions, spices, and optional forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 305 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Game Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Remove the meat from the roast bird and chop the bones.

  2. Fry the sliced onion in a little fat until browned.

  3. Add the meat and bones to the pan, stir, and dust with flour.

  4. Pour in the gravy from the roast and warm water, stirring well.

  5. Transfer to a stewing pan, add cloves, pepper, salt, lime juice, and sugar.

  6. Simmer gently for 45 minutes, then strain the soup.

  7. If not using the balls, add a pinch of thyme at the beginning.

Finish

  1. Stir in port wine or sherry and cooked forcemeat balls, if using.

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. Lime + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Remains of a roast bird
Provides the meat and bones that give the soup its main savoury flavour.
Flour
Dusted over the browned meat and bones to thicken the soup slightly.
Gravy from the roast
Adds concentrated roasted flavour and body to the broth.
Onion
Browning in fat adds sweetness and deeper savoury flavour to the base.
Port wine or sherry
Adds a fruity, rounded flavour and aroma at the end of cooking.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 45 minutes. A gentle simmer extracts flavour from the bones and meat slowly while keeping the broth clear. A hard boil makes it cloudy and can break down the flour's thickening, so keep the heat low.

Swap the thyme

The recipe marks thyme as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, flour, clove, pepper, lime, sugar, port wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits about as well
  4. Thymethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, flour, clove, pepper, lime, sugar, port wine. 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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