Home › The Principles of Cookery › GROUSE SOUP (another way)
GROUSE SOUP (another way)
Take a brace of grouse, or any other game, cut them into neat joints, and fry them in butter till lightly browned, then put them into two quarts of good unseasoned stock, with a salt-spoonful of bruised celery-seed, or the outer sticks of two heads of celery, three onions, with two or three cloves stuck in them, and a tablespoonful of ground rice, smoothly mixed with a little cold water. Bring the liquid to a boil, then simmer gently, and about twenty minutes before the soup is taken off add a fresh young cabbage, quartered. Simmer gently till the game is tender. Season with a dessert-spoonful of salt and a salt-spoonful of cayenne. A little mushroom-ketchup and a wine-glassful of claret may be added, if liked. Time, ten minutes to fry the grouse; simmer the game until tender. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian game soup that doubles as a way of using birds too tough to roast. The one thing to change is the cabbage, which is put in far too early for modern taste.
- A braceTwo birds. Red grouse dress out small — roughly 12 oz each — so a brace serves the stated six to eight only because the soup is generous with stock and vegetables.
- If you have no grouseThe recipe invites "any other game." Pheasant, guinea fowl or partridge all work; with farmed birds the flavour is milder, so lean on the mushroom ketchup and claret rather than treating them as optional.
- Two quartsImperial measure: about 2.3 litres, or roughly 2 1/2 US quarts. Use unsalted stock as directed, since the soup reduces while the birds cook.
- Spoon measuresA salt-spoonful is about 1/4 teaspoon; a dessert-spoonful about 2 teaspoons; a wine-glassful roughly 2 fl oz. Two teaspoons of salt in 2.3 litres is defensible, but add it in stages at the end and taste — commercial stock is rarely as neutral as the Victorian article.
- Ground riceRice milled to a fine granular meal, still sold under that name in Britain; it is coarser than rice flour, though rice flour will stand in. Slaked in cold water first, it gives a light body without the pastiness of a flour roux. A tablespoon in two quarts thickens very slightly; that is the intention.
- The cabbageTwenty minutes turns quartered young cabbage grey and sulphurous. Give wedges 8 to 10 minutes at a bare simmer, added once the birds are already tender.
- Cooking the birds"Until tender" means 45 minutes to an hour for young birds, up to two hours for old ones. Simmer, never boil, or the breast meat shreds and the stock clouds.
- Before servingLift the joints out, strip the meat, discard skin, bones and the clove-studded onions, and return the meat to the pot. Grouse bones are small and splintery, and the recipe says nothing about removing them.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not the sweet tomato condiment. Still available from British specialists; a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce plus a little soy is the usual stand-in.
Cassell's gives grouse soup twice because a Victorian kitchen received game in whatever condition the shoot provided, and only young birds are worth roasting. Older, tougher grouse — and the legs and carcasses of the young ones — went into soups like this one. Red grouse (Lagopus lagopus scotica) has never been successfully farmed, so it arrived strictly in season, from the twelfth of August onward, and the book records the cost here as "uncertain." The supporting cast is thoroughly of its period: celery seed standing in for celery out of season, onions stuck with cloves, ground rice as a genteel thickener, and the near-obligatory finishing splash of mushroom ketchup and claret to deepen the colour and the savour.