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Mock Hare Soup

A hearty soup made with haricot beans, onions, lemon rind, butter, and mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Mock Hare Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the beans and soak them overnight in 4 pints of water.

  2. Combine the soaked beans, onion stuck with cloves, and lemon rind in a saucepan; bring to a boil.

  3. Melt enough butter to cover the bottom in another saucepan.

  4. Add the shredded onion and cook until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Add the cooked onion to the beans and simmer for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Rub the mixture through a wire sieve, return the soup to the saucepan, and add mushroom ketchup, salt, pepper, and butter.

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. Lemon + peppertop 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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  5. Beans + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together411 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown haricot beans
Form the body of the soup, thickening it as they break down during long simmering.
Onion
Adds sweetness and savoury depth as it softens into the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Simmering the beans for 4 to 5 hours. Beans must be fully tender before sieving; undercooked beans stay firm and grainy, and the soup will not thicken smoothly when rubbed through the sieve.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, butter, clove, pepper, mushroom, ketchup):

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, butter, clove, pepper, mushroom, 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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