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Habe Soup

A soup made with hare, carrots, celery, turnip, onions, herbs, and red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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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 ↓

Habe Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the fillets and a few slices from the legs of the hare for another dish.

  2. Cut the hare into pieces.

  3. Slice the vegetables.

Make the soup

  1. Heat the butter in a pan and fry the vegetables with the herbs and spices, covered, for about 15 minutes.

  2. Add the water, salt, and pepper; simmer gently until the hare is tender, about 2 hours.

  3. Pound the meat in a mortar.

  4. Strain the soup through a sieve.

  5. Bring the soup to a boil.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix the flour with cold water and cook it in the soup for 10 minutes.

  2. Stir in the red currant jelly and port wine before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Hare
Provides the rich, savoury meat that becomes tender during the long simmer.
Butter
Fat that carries the vegetable and spice flavours during the first frying.
Flour
Starch that thickens the soup as it cooks.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity tang that balances the rich broth.
Port wine
Adds depth and a sweet, fortified flavour to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Mix the flour with cold water. Starch clumps if added dry or to hot liquid. Suspending it in cold water first lets it disperse evenly, and it thickens only once the soup is hot enough to gelatinise it.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, clove, port wine, pepper, onion, turnip):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, clove, port wine, pepper, onion, 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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