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Pheasant Soup

A soup made from roasted pheasant, beef broth, rice, butter, bread crumbs, spices, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Pheasant Soup

Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Pheasant Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pheasants

  1. Roast the pheasants until half cooked.

  2. Coat them with flour.

  3. Once cooled, remove the flesh from the breasts.

  4. Set aside, covering it to keep it fresh.

  5. Cut the remaining parts of the pheasants into joints.

  6. Bruise the bodies.

Make the soup

  1. Stew the pheasants gently in the beef broth for 2-3 hours.

  2. Strain the soup.

  3. Press out as much liquid as possible from the pheasants.

  4. Let the soup cool.

Make the forcemeat balls

  1. Mince the skins from the breasts and pound them with the butter and bread crumbs.

  2. Season the mixture with cayenne, salt, mace, and nutmeg to taste.

  3. Prepare the rice.

  4. Add it to the soup as needed.

  5. Moisten the mixture with the egg yolks.

  6. Roll into small balls, dusting with flour.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

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

  5. Pheasant + beeftop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together131 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

Pheasants
Provide the main meat and flavour for the broth and the breast flesh for the balls.
Beef broth
Forms the liquid base and carries the flavour of the stewed pheasants.
Rice
Adds body and thickening to the soup and the mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the pounded mixture, keeping the balls tender.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture together so the balls hold their shape.

The step that matters

Let the soup cool before adding the rice and forming the balls. Adding rice or shaping the mixture into a hot soup can cause it to break down or fall apart, since the binding fats and egg yolks need to be worked in gently at a lower temperature to hold their structure.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, beef, rice, butter, bread, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, beef, rice, butter, bread, pepper, nutmeg. 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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