Name: Hare-pie, Saxon Way
Ingredients: 1 pound flour; ½ pound butter; salt to taste; water as needed; 1 tender hare; fat fresh bacon (equal weight to hare meat); 6 ounces raw ham; cooked fine herbs (mushrooms, parsley, onion)

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Hare-pie, Saxon Way

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare short pastry with flour, butter, salt, and water; let it rest for 1 hour.
Skin and draw the hare; remove shoulders and legs, then bone them.
Cut hare meat into squares, chop with bacon and ham, then pound and season.
Add cooked fine herbs to the meat mixture.
Lard the loins, cut into pieces, and half-cook in melted bacon.
Prepare gravy with bones, neck, ham trimmings, vegetables, aromatics, and a little wine; reduce to half-glaze with Madeira.

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.

Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,626 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Mushroom + parsleytop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,132 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, meat, ham, mushroom, onion):

Thymefits better
Garlicfits better
Capersfits about as well
Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, meat, ham, mushroom, onion. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.