Not Endives, but Partridge Soup Instead

Hwsgo has made a special request to eat my cooking at the weekend. I am deeply touched; very few people who eat my home-cooking ever come back for me. Except my best friend Marcus, who has spent years searing his tastebuds with Midlands curries, and is probably immune to anything with a low Scoville rating. The upshot of this is that, having missed the partridge and peas, he's determined not to miss the endives, so no endive recipe tonight. On the up side, i got home from late and would have been up til late cooking the endives anyway, and wouldn't have been able to do anything with my leftover partridge. So today's recipe is partridge soup, very very loosely based on the Grouse Soup on page 101 (so loosely that it counts as guidance rather than interpretation).

I don't have: grouse, carrots, celery, flat shrooms, brandy, port, juniper berries, redcurrant jelly or pearl barley; I do bizarrely have everything else on the (22-item) ingredients list. So I've done a little bit of substitution (I will go back and do this recipe properly later, honest); 1 whole partridge plus 1 partridge carcas instead of grouse, 2 big potatoes cubed instead of carrots and celery, 1 1/2 packs of local chestnut mustrooms instead of flat black mushrooms (portobello?), more red wine to cover the deficit of brandy and port (port never survives very long in this house; it has a half-life that's only just longer than chocolate) , and no juniper berries, redcurrent jeely or pearl barley at all. But I've followed the steps in the recipe as closely as I can.

It's strange how a dish mutates over time. It starts off as raw ingredients together in a pan; sometimes yummy, other times inedible; then goes through a cooked-enough to be yummy again (just before the wine went in) stage, then back to inedible (post wine), then eventually if you're lucky, to yummy again. The temptation to eat at an early stage of yumminess can sometimes be astounding. Which is my excuse for licking cooking bowls after making puddings; it's maybe the only thing that stops me diving onto the mixture before it's cooked. Oh yes: the red wine. It's a Richard Dreys Dornfelder which has been hiding in the understairs cupboard since hwsgo found it in the wine rack and laughed at how I had such bad wine taste that I even deliberately chose a german red. It was either that or one of the bottles of pre-made mulled wine that have been lurking there with it. I haven't quite had the courage to try a glass of it yet, and am currently finishing off the remains of yesterday's white.

I'm spending an hour waiting for the soup to boil and produce scummy bits on top. And this project is strange. I've kept diaries, and blogs on topics of interest before (and really must post some more on creativity and fusion sometime), but this coming home and cooking is strangely calming. It's bringing a structure to my evenings that I didn't know was missing. Usually I collapse in front of the TV, or read a book, or crawl into bed; now I'm working to a timetable every evening, and have breaks like this that I can actively do something (in between skimming off scum) with. I thought I might thoroughly resent the tyrrany of having to cook, but I find it strangely comforting. I think Julie did too. Although I must point out again that I am somewhat less kooky than her, even if that might be by a relatively small margin.

It's good soup; meaty, a posher version of oxtail broth. The wine isn't bad either; fruity and not a bad foil for the soup. The floury white bread roll goes well with it too.