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Hashed Game

A stew of game pieces simmered with onion, pepper, lemon peel, and stock, thickened with butter and flour, finished with wine, lemon juice, and ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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

Prepare the stock

  1. Cut the remains of cold game into joints, reserving the best pieces.

  2. Put the inferior pieces and trimmings into a stewpan with the onion, pepper, lemon peel, salt, and water or weak stock.

  3. Stew for about an hour, then strain the gravy.

Finish the gravy

  1. Thicken the gravy with butter and flour, then add the wine, lemon juice, and ketchup.

  2. Add the pieces of game and warm them through by the side of the fire without boiling.

Serve

  1. When on the point of simmering, serve and garnish with slices 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Clove + port winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold game
Provides the meat and main flavour of the dish.
Butter and flour
Thicken the gravy so it coats the pieces of game.
Port wine
Adds depth, sweetness and aroma to the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness, acidity and savoury depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Warm the game without boiling. Boiling toughens the proteins in meat and can make it dry and stringy, so the pieces of game should only be heated through just below a simmer.

Swap the onion

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

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

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