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Hare Soup, or Game Soup

A soup made from hare, bones, water, onions, mace, anchovy, mushroom ketchup, ham, pepper, salt, port wine, and liver.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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, removing all hairs and saving the blood and liver.

  2. Chop and bruise the bones.

  3. Place the bones 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, pepper, and salt between the two pots.

Make the soup

  1. Slowly bring both pots to a boil.

  2. Skim the pots clean.

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

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

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

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

  7. Simmer for a few minutes without boiling.

  8. Strain into the soup.

  9. 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 saved 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 rich gamey flavour that forms the body of the soup.
Liver of the hare
Blended with blood and port, it thickens the soup and gives it a rich, smooth body.
Hare blood
Thickens the liver mixture and adds body and depth to the finished soup.
Onions
Release sweetness and aromatic flavour into the stock during long simmering.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity aroma to the liver mixture stirred into the soup.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the stock.

The step that matters

Stir the liver mixture in off the heat. Boiling again after the liver is added causes it to curdle and become grainy, spoiling the smooth texture. Removing the soup from heat first keeps the liver silky.

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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