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Hare Soup

A hearty soup made from hare, beef, onions, carrots, peppercorns, celery seed, sweet herbs, and finished with port and hare blood.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Hare Soup

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Hare Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare and stock

  1. Skin and empty the hare, cut it into joints, remove the eyes, and split the head in two.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the hare, beef, and cold water.

  3. Remove scum as it rises.

  4. When boiling, add onions, carrots, peppercorns, and celery seed in muslin.

  5. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

  6. Remove the best joints, take meat off the bones, and return bones to the pot.

  7. Simmer for another hour.

  8. Add salt and sweet herbs during the last part of simmering.

Thicken and finish

  1. Fry chopped onions in butter.

  2. Mix with ground rice or flour.

  3. Moisten with some liquid from the soup.

  4. Add this mixture to the soup and boil.

  5. Strain through a colander.

  6. Pick meat from the hare pieces left in the soup, pound it, and pass through a coarse sieve back into the liquid.

  7. Return the reserved hare pieces to the soup.

  8. Heat thoroughly.

  9. Add hare's blood if desired.

  10. Stir in the port.

  11. Serve with force-meat balls.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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 and rich, gamey flavour that gives the soup its character.
Shin of beef
Adds gelatin and body to the stock as it simmers slowly for hours.
Ground rice or flour
Thickens the soup, giving it a smooth, body-rich texture when boiled.
Port
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour stirred in at the end.
Chopped onions
Softened in butter, they add sweetness and aroma to the base.

The step that matters

Adding the ground rice or flour mixture. Starch must be fully cooked after it is added to the soup, or it stays raw-tasting and clumps. Moistening it first with warm liquid and then boiling the soup lets the starch swell evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, carrot, celery, rice, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, celery, rice, 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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