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To Hodge-podge a Hare

A slow-cooked hare stew simmered with onions, herbs, butter, and optional vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Hodge-podge a Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the hare pieces in a pitcher.

  2. Add onions, salt, pepper, sweet herbs, and butter.

  3. Seal the pitcher tightly to prevent steam from escaping.

  4. If desired, add lettuce, cucumbers, celery, and turnips when first placing the hare in the kettle.

Stew

  1. Submerge the pitcher in a kettle of boiling water.

  2. Keep the kettle filled with water as it evaporates.

  3. Stew for 4-5 hours.

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. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Cucumber + turniptop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Hare
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle stewing.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth as they soften during cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, rounding out the flavour of the stewed meat.

The step that matters

Keep the kettle filled with water as it evaporates. If the water boils down and the kettle runs dry, the pitcher loses its gentle water-bath heat and the meat can scorch or cook unevenly. Steady water keeps the temperature even over the long stew.

Swap the lettuce

The recipe marks lettuce as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, pepper, butter, cucumber, celery, turnip):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Lettucethe original
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Carrotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, pepper, butter, cucumber, celery, turnip. 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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