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Hare Soup, No. 1

A hearty soup made from hare, vegetables, herbs, and stock, simmered with spices and optional hare blood.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Hare Soup, No. 1

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Cut the hare into joints and dredge each piece with flour.

  2. Fry the hare pieces in butter until browned.

Make the soup base

  1. Fry the carrot, onions, celery, garlic, and mushroom in the same butter.

  2. Combine the fried ingredients in a stewpan with water, herbs, parsley, salt, sugar, mace, cloves, mustard, and cayenne.

  3. Boil quickly, skim, then simmer gently for 1 hour.

  4. Remove the hare, cut the meat into 16 pieces, and return the bones and trimmings to the stewpan.

  5. Add stock and the hare's blood, then boil for 2 hours.

  6. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve, incorporating as much meat as possible.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the hare pieces to the stewpan and simmer for 10 minutes.

  2. Add port wine and simmer for another 10 minutes 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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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, whose flavour and body give the soup its character.
Flour
Coats the hare pieces so they brown well and help thicken the soup.
Butter
Carries the browning of the hare and vegetables, adding richness and savoury flavour.
Onions
Build a sweet, savoury base as they soften and brown in butter.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of aroma at the end of cooking.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a fine sieve, incorporating as much meat as possible.. Pressing the cooked solids through a fine sieve breaks them down and carries their flavour and body into the liquid, thickening the soup. Skipping this leaves the soup thin and grainy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, carrot, celery, garlic, mushroom, parsley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, carrot, celery, garlic, mushroom, parsley. 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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