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A Less Expensive Hare Soup

A hearty soup made with hare, beef, vegetables, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

A Less Expensive Hare Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine beef, hare, and cold water in a large pot. Bring to a boil and skim thoroughly.

  2. Add salt, onions, celery, carrots, peppercorns, and cloves. Reduce heat and let simmer gently for 3 hours or until hare is tender.

Prepare the meat and thicken

  1. Remove hare joints, cut meat from bones, and mince finely.

  2. Soak the bread crumb in a little boiling soup, then press dry in a cloth.

  3. Mix the minced meat with the soaked bread and strain the soup.

  4. Season with cayenne.

  5. If not thick enough, add arrow-root.

Serve

  1. Serve when just boiling.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Bread crumb
Soaked and mixed with the minced meat, it helps bind and thicken the soup.
Arrow-root
Starch that thickens the soup further if it is not thick enough.
Beef neck or shin
Breaks down during long simmering, adding body and rich flavour to the broth.
Hare
Main meat, which becomes tender through simmering and is minced back into the soup.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 3 hours. A gentle simmer lets the hare become tender without the meat toughening or breaking apart, and keeps the broth clear. A hard boil makes the liquid cloudy and can toughen the proteins.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, celery, carrot, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, celery, carrot, bread. 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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