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Scotch Hare Soup

A soup made from hare, celery, and spices, simmered and finished with buttered meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Scotch Hare Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Save as much blood from the hares as possible.

  2. Cut one hare into joints to make stock.

  3. Boil the hare joints in enough water for the soup.

  4. Add the second hare whole to the pot.

  5. Simmer for several hours.

  6. Strain the stock and reserve the meat.

Make the soup

  1. Fry the reserved meat in butter.

  2. Add flour to the meat.

  3. Pour the strained stock over the meat.

  4. Boil with chopped celery.

  5. Season with coarse sea salt.

  6. Add a pinch of cayenne pepper.

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Hares
Provide the meat and flavour that form the body of the soup.
Celery
Adds a fresh, aromatic vegetable flavour to the simmered stock.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the fried meat and stock.
Butter
Fat that frying the meat in it adds richness and browning.

The step that matters

Fry the reserved meat in butter before adding flour. Browning the meat in fat builds savoury, roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction. Adding flour to meat that is not yet browned can leave the soup tasting flat and pasty.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, butter. 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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