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Hare Soup, or Game Soup

A soup made from hare bones, meat, onions, mace, anchovy, mushroom ketchup, ham or bacon, seasoned with pepper, salt, port wine, liver, and blood.

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

Prepare the hare

  1. Skin the hare carefully, leaving no hairs, and save all the blood and liver.

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

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

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

  5. Slowly bring both pots to a boil. Skim the pots clean.

Make the soup

  1. Cover and simmer for 4 to 5 hours or bake in the oven.

  2. Remove the hare pieces and strain both soups 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. Simmer for a few minutes without boiling.

  5. Strain the liquid into the soup.

  6. 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 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 main meat and, with the bones, the rich flavour of the soup.
Blood of the hare
Thickens the soup as it is stirred in, giving it body and a richer colour.
Liver of the hare
Adds depth and body to the finished soup once blended with blood and wine.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and aroma, and helps soften the liver mixture before it goes into the soup.
Onions
Build savoury sweetness and aromatic depth as they simmer in the stock.

The step that matters

Remove the soup from the heat and stir in the liver mixture. Blood thickens and can curdle when it boils, so the soup must be off the heat when it is added and must not be reheated after, or its smooth texture will be spoiled.

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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