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To Dress Hare Collops

A dish of minced hare collops cooked with butter, onion, pepper, salt, flour, gravy, ketchup, lemon, nutmeg, and garnished with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

To Dress Hare Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the solid meat off each side of the backbone and mince it small.

Make the collops

  1. In a stew-pan, melt the butter and add the minced onion, pepper, and salt.

  2. Add the collops to the pan and cook gently, bruising them with the back of a spoon.

  3. Dust in a little flour and add the gravy, then cover the pan and let it stew.

  4. After a while, add the ketchup, lemon juice, and grated nutmeg.

Serve

  1. Dish and garnish with fried slices of 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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Solid meat from hare
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender through gentle stewing.
Flour
Dusted on the meat to thicken the gravy as it stews.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries flavour into the meat.
Gravy
Provides liquid for stewing and moistens the meat.
Ketchup
Adds tangy sweetness and depth of savoury flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the collops gently. Stewing over low heat keeps the minced meat tender and moist; high heat toughens its proteins and can dry it out, so cover and keep it at a gentle simmer.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, pepper, flour, ketchup, lemon, nutmeg. 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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