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Hare or Rabbit Soup

A hearty soup made from hare or rabbit, bacon, onions, herbs, spices, and red wine, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Hare or Rabbit Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hares

  1. Remove the skin and entrails from the hares.

Stew

  1. Place the hares in a pot with bacon, chopped onions, thyme, and parsley.

  2. Add pepper, coarse sea salt, pounded cloves, mace, and enough water to cover.

  3. Stew gently for 3 hours.

Thicken and serve

  1. Remove the thyme and parsley before thickening the soup.

  2. Thicken with butter and brown flour, then add red wine.

  3. Boil for a few more minutes and serve with the best parts of the hares.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hares
Provide the meat that becomes tender during the long, gentle stew.
Bacon
Adds fat and smoky, savoury flavour to the broth.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with butter, giving it body.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the finished soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, thyme, parsley, pepper, clove, butter, flour):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, thyme, parsley, pepper, clove, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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