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Hashed Game

A stew of game, onion, pepper, lemon peel, salt, and stock, thickened with butter flour, finished with port wine, lemon juice ketchup, served with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

Make the gravy

  1. Place the inferior pieces and trimmings of cold game in a stew-pan with onion, pepper, lemon peel, salt, and enough water or weak stock to cover.

  2. Stew for about 1 hour, then strain the gravy.

  3. Thicken the gravy with butter and flour.

  4. Add port wine, lemon juice, and ketchup to the gravy.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the pieces of game to the pan and warm them by the side of the fire without boiling.

  2. Serve garnished with snippets of toasted bread.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cold game
Provides the main meat and flavour that gives the gravy its character.
Butter
Combines with flour to form a roux that thickens the gravy and adds richness.
All-purpose flour
Starch that thickens the gravy when cooked with butter, giving it body.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and balances its sweetness.

The step that matters

Warm the game without boiling. Boiling toughens cooked meat proteins and makes them dry and stringy, so the pieces should only be gently heated in the gravy.

Swap the onion

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

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

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