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To Hodge Podge a Hare

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 with onions, salt, pepper, herbs, and butter.

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

Cook

  1. Submerge the pitcher in a kettle of boiling water, ensuring the kettle remains filled as water evaporates.

  2. Simmer for 4-5 hours.

  3. If desired, add lettuce, cucumbers, celery, and turnips at the start.

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 during long, gentle simmering.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury depth to the stew's liquid as they cook down.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, giving the broth a rounder mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Keeping the kettle topped up with water. Boiling water surrounds the sealed pitcher and gently heats its contents. If the kettle runs dry, the pitcher stops receiving steady heat and the hare may cook unevenly, so the water level must be maintained throughout the long simmer.

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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