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PARTRIDGES, SOUP OF (another way)
When partridges are too old to be satisfactorily cooked in any other way, they may be made into soup, but it must be understood that the soup will not be so good as if it were made from young birds. Skin the partridges and cut them into joints. Fry them in butter with two sliced onions until lightly browned. Put them into a saucepan with three ounces of uncooked lean ham and four or five sticks of celery, and pour over them two quarts of good stock. Bring the soup to a boil, skim carefully, then draw it to the side of the fire, and let it simmer gently for an hour. At the end of that time put into it a tea-spoonful of salt and half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, and stew another hour. Strain the soup, pick the meat from the birds, and pound it in a mortar to a smooth paste, and with it its bulk in bread, which has been soaked in stock and pressed very dry. Mix this gradually with the soup, pass it again through a sieve, put it into a saucepan, bring it to the point of boiling, and serve immediately. Probable cost, 1s. 10d. per quart. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A Victorian game purée that turns tough old birds into a thick, meaty soup. The thickening is a bread panade, not flour or cream, and the final reheating is where it can go wrong.
- Do not boil after thickeningOnce the pounded meat and bread go in, take the soup only to the point of boiling. Held at a rolling boil the purée separates and catches on the pan bottom, and the flavour turns dull and scorched.
- The birdsGrey or red-legged partridge, oven-ready; a grey bird runs around 8-12 oz, a red-legged one rather heavier. The recipe does not say how many birds to use; two or three suit this quantity of stock. Frozen game works well here since the recipe assumes old, tough meat anyway. Skin rather than pluck, as directed.
- MeasuresTwo imperial quarts is about 2.3 litres (roughly 10 US cups). Three ounces of ham is about 85 g. The 1s 10d per quart is a Victorian price and has no modern equivalent.
- Uncooked lean hamThis means raw cured ham, not the cooked pink slices. Use a piece of unsmoked gammon, a prosciutto end, or a bacon hock trimmed of fat. It is there for salt and depth, so hold back on the teaspoon of salt until you have tasted at the end.
- "Draw it to the side of the fire"A bare simmer, with barely a tremble on the surface. On a modern hob that is the lowest setting that keeps bubbles moving, for the full two hours in total.
- Peppercorns added lateWhole peppercorns go in only for the second hour, and the soup is strained afterwards, so they perfume rather than sharpen. Keep them whole; ground pepper cannot be strained out and will make the finished purée gritty.
- Pounding and sievingA food processor does the mortar's work in seconds. The bread should be soaked in stock and squeezed genuinely dry, then blitzed with the picked meat until smooth. Pushing the mixture through a fine sieve afterwards is what makes the difference between a velvety soup and a grainy one.
- YieldSix servings as a first course, and it thickens considerably as it stands. Loosen with extra hot stock rather than water when reheating.
Cassell's gives this as the second of its partridge soups, and the opening sentence explains why it exists: the Victorian game season delivered birds of all ages to the kitchen, and an old partridge roasted is dry and sinewy. Sending it to the stockpot was a familiar economy, and the frankness about the result — the soup "will not be so good as if it were made from young birds" — is characteristic of the book's reference-manual tone. The thickening technique is older than roux-based purées: bread soaked in stock, wrung out and pounded with the meat, is a medieval and early-modern way of binding a soup, and it persisted in English game and almond soups. The costing per quart, given alongside the number of persons served, reflects the book's audience of households keeping accounts, for whom a soup that used up unroastable birds was a genuine saving.