№ 7Putnu zupa

Roast bird soup with stuffed bread Serves 4–6 · about 2¾ hours, plus the stuffed bread · Adapted from the 1796 recipe; not yet tested.

The book gives no quantities; the amounts below are ours.

Ingredients

• The carcass and leftovers of 1 roast chicken, or of 2 roast pheasants, partridges or pigeons (about 800 g with the bones)
• 40 g butter
• 1 tbsp plain flour
• 1 onion, 1 parsley root and 1 carrot, finely diced
• 1.75 l meat broth or boiling water
• An 80 g piece of bacon or salt pork
• For the roux: 30 g butter and 2 tbsp plain flour
• 1 stuffed bread roll and its dumplings (01-008)
• ½ tsp black pepper, crushed
• ¼ tsp ground mace
• Salt
• Instead of the stuffed bread: 1 oven-ready partridge and ½ lemon

Method

1. Trim off anything that isn't good to eat, such as burnt skin. Break up the carcass and chop the meat and bones as small as you can with a heavy cleaver, or pound them in a large mortar. 2. Melt the butter in a heavy casserole or wide pan. Add the chopped bird, flour, onion, parsley root and carrot and cook over low heat, stirring now and then, for 20–30 minutes, until everything is brown. 3. Pour in the broth or boiling water a little at a time, scraping up the brown bits. Add the bacon. Simmer gently, partly covered, for 1–1½ hours, until the soup tastes strong. 4. In a clean pan, melt 30 g butter, stir in 2 tbsp flour and cook over low to medium heat, stirring all the time, for 5–8 minutes, until nut-brown. Don't let it burn. 5. Strain the soup through a fine sieve into the brown roux, pressing on the solids, and whisk until smooth. Throw away the bones and bacon. 6. Bring to a simmer and add the stuffed bread from 01-008, the pepper, mace and salt. Simmer gently for 25–30 minutes, turning the bread once, until its filling reaches 75 °C in the centre. Add the dumplings for the last 8–10 minutes. 7. Lift the bread into a tureen and cut off the string. Pour the soup and dumplings around it and cut it at the table.

Partridge instead of bread: cut deep slits on both sides along the breastbone and push pieces of lemon into them. Simmer it in the strained soup (step 6) for 35–45 minutes, until the thickest part of the thigh reaches 75 °C.

Notes

• What the book says vs. what we added: the method is the book's: a roast bird pounded with its bones, browned in butter with flour and roots, simmered with bacon until strong, strained into a brown roux and finished with the stuffed bread, pepper, mace and salt. The amounts and times are ours. We read the book's piesijā as "strain into".
• Leftovers: the book says the soup can also be made from the bones left over from roast birds. That is the easiest way today.
• Stuffed bread: see 01-008, which the book prints as a footnote to this recipe. Make it while the soup simmers in step 3.
• Partridge: the book says an unlarded partridge, that is, one not larded with strips of bacon for roasting. We assume it goes in raw.