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Game Soup
Put the carcasses and remains of any cold cooked game into a stewpan with two or three peeled carrots and turnips, a bunch of sweet herbs, salt and pepper to taste, and a moderate quantity of spices. Cover the whole with plenty of stock and simmer gently for three or four hours. When sufficiently boiled strain the liquor into a basin, pick off all the meat that can be got from the bones and pound it in a mortar, soak half its bulk of breadcrumbs in a little of the liquor, and when soft mix them with the meat. Pass the mixture through a fine hair sieve, put in a saucepan with the strained liquor, add more seasoning if necessary and boil. Beat the yolks of two eggs and a wineglassful of sherry, strain and stir in with the soup, first moving the saucepan to the side of the fire. Turn the soup into a tureen and serve it with a plate of sippets of toast or croutons of bread fried in butter.
A thrift soup built on the bones of yesterday's roast game, thickened first with a bread-and-meat purée and finished with an egg-and-sherry liaison. The finish is the only step that can go wrong.
- Never boil after the yolks go inThe final "boil" applies to the soup before the eggs. Once the beaten yolks and sherry are stirred in, the pan must stay off direct heat and below a simmer, or the yolks curdle into threads. "Moving the saucepan to the side of the fire" is the period instruction for what we would call removing it from the burner.
- What counts as gamePheasant, partridge, grouse, wild duck, venison or rabbit, roasted and picked over. A carcass or two of each is fine, and mixing birds is traditional rather than a fault. Domestic duck or dark turkey scraps will make a good soup along the same lines, though a milder one.
- A wineglassfulAbout 2 fl oz, or 4 tablespoons, in the measure of the period. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso rather than cream sherry.
- Sweet herbs and "a moderate quantity of spices"Sweet herbs means a bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf. The spices are left unspecified; a blade of mace, two or three cloves and a dozen peppercorns suit game without covering it.
- Stock"Plenty of stock" means enough to cover the bones and vegetables by an inch or two, perhaps 3 to 4 quarts for two or three carcasses. Brown veal or beef stock suits it; unsalted chicken stock works, but season at the end since the liquid reduces over four hours.
- Mortar and hair sieveA food processor does the pounding, and a fine mesh sieve replaces the horsehair one. Push the meat and soaked bread through with a ladle; the point of sieving is to catch sinew and shot, so do not skip it in favour of blending alone.
- BreadcrumbsStale white crumb, half the volume of the picked meat, soaked in a little of the hot broth. This is the thickener; the soup should coat a spoon lightly, not stand up in it.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast, served alongside on a plate rather than floated. The recipe's alternative is croutons of bread fried in butter, which can be cut from a day-old loaf.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 10 servings as a first course, depending on how far the bones were covered. It reheats gently but will not tolerate a second boil once enriched.
Game soup is an English country-house economy, carried into American hotel cooking with the rest of the classical repertoire: the birds went to the dining room whole, the frames went back to the kitchen, and nothing that had cost a shooting party its morning was thrown away. Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name fronts The Cook Book of 1896, was assembling a working reference for a house that served game in quantity, and a soup like this one belongs to the unglamorous side of that operation, the part diners never saw. The technique is older than the hotel by a century or more: purée soups bound with pounded meat and soaked bread, then finished with a liaison of egg yolks and fortified wine, are standard in early nineteenth-century English cookery, and "sippets" is an old kitchen word for small pieces of fried or toasted bread.