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Hare Soup

A soup made from hare meat, stock, celery, stale bread, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Hare Soup

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Hare Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick out the best meat from the hare and cut it into very small pieces. Keep it covered in a cool place until needed.

Make the soup

  1. Place the remaining hare, bones, trimmings, stuffing, and gravy in a saucepan. Cover with good stock.

  2. Add the celery and stale bread. Simmer gently until the celery is tender.

  3. Strain the mixture, remove the bones, and rub the celery and remaining ingredients through a sieve.

  4. Mix the pulp with the stock and return it to the saucepan. Bring to a boil.

  5. If the soup is too thin, thicken it with a little cornflour.

Finish and serve

  1. Add cayenne pepper to taste and a squeeze of lemon before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Celery + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Remains of jugged hare
Provides the main meat flavour and body of the soup.
Celery
Adds a fresh, savoury vegetable flavour and body when rubbed through the sieve.
Stale bread
Helps thicken the soup and give it a smooth, body-rich texture.
Cornflour
Thickens the liquid if the soup is too thin.

The step that matters

Rubbing through the sieve. Pressing the celery, bread and remaining solids through a sieve breaks them down into a smooth pulp that gives the soup its body. Skipping or rushing this leaves the soup gritty and thin.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, lemon. 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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