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Hashed Game

A stew of cold game, onion, garlic, peppers, lemon peel and seasonings, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hashed Game

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the remains of cold game into joints.

  2. Stick the onion with the cloves.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pot, combine the game, onion, whole peppers, lemon peel, and salt.

  2. Add the water or stock and bring to a boil.

  3. Thicken with a mixture of butter and flour.

  4. Stir in the port wine, lemon juice, and ketchup.

  5. Simmer until heated through.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Clove + port winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter and flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, rich sauce as the starch swells when heated.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavour of the game.
Ketchup
Adds tomato sweetness and acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken with a mixture of butter and flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid long enough for its starch to swell and thicken the sauce; adding it lumpy or without enough heating leaves a pasty, floury taste and uneven texture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, pepper, lemon, butter, flour, port wine, ketchup):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, pepper, lemon, butter, flour, port wine, ketchup. 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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