Pheasant Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 10 or 12 persons. 2 pheasants, lb. of butter, 2 slices of ham, 2 large onions, sliced, 1/24 head of celery, the crumb of 2 French rolls, the yolks of 2 1/2 eggs, boiled hard, salt and cayenne to taste, a little pounded mace, if liked; 3 quarts of stock. AVERAGE COST, 7s. 6d.
Cut up the pheasants, flour and braise them in the butter and ham till they are of a nice brown, but not burnt. Put them in a stewpan, with the onions, celery, stock and seasoning, and simmer for 2 hours.
Strain the soup; pound the breasts with the crumb of the roll, previously soaked, and the yolks of the eggs; put it to the soup, give one boil, and serve.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE from October to February.
Note. Fragments, pieces and bones of cold game may be used to great advantage in this soup, and then 1 pheasant will suffice.
PICKLE, INDIAN.
A Victorian game soup thickened the old way, with bread and hard-boiled egg yolk rather than flour or cream. Two of the quantities in this text are garbled in the original printing, so read them with care.
- The missing butter weightThe ingredient list prints "lb. of butter" with the fraction dropped. A quarter-pound (about 115 g) is a plausible reading for two birds, though the original figure cannot be recovered from this printing.
- "1/24 head of celery"Plainly a misprint; half a head is the likely reading. Use half a bunch of celery, sliced, stalks and leaves.
- Braise means brown hereThe instruction "braise them in the butter and ham till they are of a nice brown" means browning in fat rather than the modern closed-pot braise. Brown the floured joints in the butter with the ham, and stop short of any bitterness in the fond.
- French rollsNot a baguette. A soft white roll of a few ounces; use the crumb of two, or roughly 60-80 g of soft white bread, soaked in a little stock and squeezed out.
- The thickening is the hingeThe pounded breast meat, soaked crumb and egg yolks form a panade that binds the soup. Pound or blitz it smooth, then whisk it into the strained liquid off the heat before bringing it to a single boil. Long boiling after it goes in makes the soup grainy and can split it.
- Save the breastsSimmering two whole birds for two hours will exhaust the breast meat, but it is the breasts that go into the purée. Lift them out after 30-40 minutes, set them aside, and return the rest of the carcasses to the pot.
- StockThree quarts is about 3.4 litres in Imperial measure. A light brown veal or chicken stock is closest to Beeton's "stock"; game or pheasant stock is better still.
- Sourcing the birdsFarmed pheasant is sold oven-ready in autumn and winter; a bird is 900 g to 1.3 kg. Wild birds may carry shot, so check the flesh before pounding it. The note is correct that leftover roast game and its bones will carry the soup with only one fresh bird.
- YieldAs written, ten to twelve small soup plates. It halves readily.
Beeton's game soups are a direct product of the British shooting calendar, and the "seasonable from October to February" line is really the pheasant season written into a recipe: birds were not practically to be had in summer, and a household that received game as a gift needed ways to stretch it. The thickening technique is older than the book. Binding a soup with soaked bread and hard-boiled egg yolk instead of flour or cream belongs to an older English tradition, and it is often linked to the medieval practice of thickening with bread and almonds and to the Spanish and Portuguese *migas* and *açorda* family, though the line of descent is a traditional account rather than a documented one. The average cost of 7s 6d is a reminder of what this dish was for: it is a large, formal soup for a dinner of ten or twelve, and the note about "fragments, pieces and bones of cold game" is the thrifty version appended for the reader who had one bird rather than two.