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Hunter's Soup
Partially roast a brace of well-kept partridges, or a partridge and a grouse. Put them rather close to a clear fire, and baste them plentifully. As soon as the outside is well browned take them up, and when nearly cool cut the meat from the bones in neat fillets, and bruise the bones thoroughly. Cut half a pound of lean ham into dice, and fry these in two ounces of butter with a sliced carrot, an onion, and a little parsley. Mix in very smoothly two table-spoonfuls of flour or ground rice, and when slightly browned add two quarts of strong beef gravy, the bruised bones, and a little salt and cayenne. Simmer gently for two hours, then strain the soup. Add the slices of meat and a glass of claret, and let it heat once more without boiling. Serve the meat with the soup. Time, twenty minutes to roast the partridges. Probable cost, uncertain, game being variable in price. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian game soup that works by two-stage cooking: the birds are browned and their fillets set aside, while the crushed carcasses give the broth its depth. Everything depends on the fillets never being boiled in the finished soup.
- The hinge: do not boil at the endThe fillets go into the strained soup only to warm through, five minutes at most below a simmer. Game breast is lean and turns dry and livery the moment it boils, and the claret loses its perfume the same way.
- A brace, and what to use insteadA brace is two birds. Two whole partridges yield roughly 8-10 oz of usable fillet; if game is hard to find, two bone-in squab or four large quail carcasses give a similar result, and pheasant works though it is milder. Farmed birds have less flavour, so lean harder on the stock.
- "Well-kept" gameThis means hung for several days to develop flavour, standard practice when the book was written. Much of what you can buy today will be fresh and little hung, which is fine but tamer. Do not attempt to age birds at room temperature.
- Roasting near a clear fireThe point is fast, dry browning, not cooking through. A very hot oven or a hot skillet for a few minutes, basting with butter, browns the outside and leaves the breast underdone, which is what you want since it finishes in the soup.
- Bruise the bones thoroughlyCrack the carcasses with the flat of a heavy knife or a mallet so the marrow and joint surfaces are exposed. Whole bones simmered two hours give a thin broth; broken ones give body.
- "Strong beef gravy"Not gravy in the modern sense but a concentrated brown beef stock. Use 2 quarts of good unsalted beef stock, reduced if it tastes weak, and salt only at the end since two hours of simmering concentrates it.
- Ground rice as thickenerGround rice, still sold in some shops, is finely milled raw rice rather than rice flour's fine powder. Either it or the flour is fried with the ham and vegetables to make a roux; two tablespoons in 2 quarts gives a soup barely thicker than broth, which is correct here.
- A glass of claretClaret is red Bordeaux; a Victorian wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the measure varied. Any dry, medium-bodied red will do the same job.
- YieldSix to eight as a first course, allowing about a cup each with a few slices of meat. As a main course with bread it will stretch to four.
Game soups of this kind run through nineteenth-century English cookery books under names borrowed from the field: hunter's soup, soupe à la chasseur, or simply game soup. The logic is thrift as much as flavour, since a brace of small birds gives very little meat and it would be wasteful to throw the frames away, so the carcasses become the stock and the fillets are returned at the last moment. The recipe is a clear example of the two-stage method: extract from the bones, garnish with the flesh. The book declines to price it and simply notes that game is variable in cost.