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Hare Soup, or Game Soup

A hearty soup made from hare bones, meat, liver, blood, and seasonings simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 479 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Hare Soup, or Game Soup

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the hare

  1. Skin the hare carefully, leaving no hairs.

  2. Cut off all the flesh, saving the blood and liver.

  3. Chop and bruise the bones, placing them in one pot with 2 quarts of water.

  4. Place the meat in another pot with 2 quarts of water.

  5. Divide the onions, mace, anchovy, mushroom ketchup, ham or bacon, pepper, and salt between the two pots.

  6. Bring both pots to a slow boil, skim them clean.

Make the soup

  1. Cover and simmer for 4 to 5 hours or place in an oven at 300°F (150°C) for the same time.

  2. Remove the hare pieces and strain both soups through a sieve into a stew pan.

  3. Cut the meat into bite-sized pieces and add it to the strained soup.

  4. Pour boiling water over the bones to make the liquid up to 4 quarts.

  5. Simmer for a few minutes without boiling.

  6. Strain into the soup.

  7. Stir well and let the soup and meat stew gently together for a few more minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Parboil the liver to harden it.

  2. Rub the liver down with ½ cup port wine and the blood.

  3. Remove the soup from the heat and stir in the liver mixture.

  4. Serve in a tureen without reheating, as boiling again will spoil the texture.

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. Anchovy + ketchuptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  4. Clove + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Hare
Provides the meat and bones that give the soup its rich, gamey body.
Blood of the hare
Thickens the soup and gives it a darker colour and richer body when stirred in.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the liver and blood mixture.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth, rounding out the flavour of the stock without tasting fishy.
Onions
Release sweetness and aromatic flavour into the long-simmered stock.

The step that matters

Remove the soup from the heat before adding the liver mixture. Blood and liver proteins set and curdle when boiled, which would give a grainy texture. Stirring them in off the heat keeps the soup smooth and thick.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, onion, clove, anchovy, mushroom, ketchup, ham):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion, clove, anchovy, mushroom, ketchup, ham. 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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