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Hare Soup

A hearty soup made from hare meat, spices, and port wine, simmered and strained with pounded meat and force‑meat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Hare Soup

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Hare Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer

  1. Cut off the legs and shoulders of the hare and divide the body into 3–4 parts.

  2. Chop the kidneys, heart, and lights into pieces and add them to the pot.

  3. Add black pepper, allspice, mace, cloves, onions, carrot, bay leaf, sweet herbs, and water or broth.

  4. Simmer gently for 3 hours until the meat is tender.

Make the force-meat

  1. Remove the best meat (back and upper legs), cut into mouthfuls, and set aside.

  2. Scrape the remaining meat from the bones, chop finely, and pound with butter and flour.

Finish the soup

  1. Mix the pounded meat with some gravy and stir it back into the pot.

  2. Let it simmer gently for 30 minutes, skimming as needed.

  3. Strain the soup through a tamis and return it to the pot with the reserved meat and force‑meat balls.

  4. Add port wine, currant jelly, and salt, and cook until the balls are done.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 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, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering and is also pounded into force-meat.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, keeping the pounded force-meat moist and smooth.
Flour
Binds the pounded meat and helps thicken the gravy.
Port wine
Adds depth, fruitiness and colour to the finished soup.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a glossy body that balances the savoury broth.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 3 hours. A gentle simmer lets collagen in the meat break down slowly, giving tender meat. A hard boil toughens the muscle fibres and makes the broth cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, allspice, clove, onion, carrot, butter, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, allspice, clove, onion, carrot, butter, flour. 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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