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Hare Soup

A hearty soup made with hare, vegetables, herbs, and stock, thickened with cornflour and finished with port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Hare Soup

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Hare Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Wipe the hare with a clean damp cloth and cut it into small joints.

  2. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  3. Add the hare, sliced vegetables, and herbs, and fry until brown.

Simmer and strain

  1. Add the stock, salt, and peppercorns, and simmer gently for 3 hours.

  2. Strain the soup, remove the meat from the bones, and pound it well in a mortar.

  3. Rub the meat through a fine sieve, then return it and the stock to the stewpan.

Thicken and serve

  1. When boiling, add the wine and cornflour mixed smoothly together.

  2. Stir and cook for a few minutes, season to taste, and serve.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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 flavour that give the soup its body and character.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour and helps the hare and vegetables brown during frying.
Cornflour
Starch that thickens the stock once it is brought to a boil, giving the soup body.
Port wine
Adds acidity and sweetness, rounding out the savoury stock with a fuller flavour.
Second stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying the flavour of the simmered ingredients.

The step that matters

Adding the cornflour. Cornflour must be mixed smoothly with cold liquid before it goes into the boiling soup, otherwise it clumps. Cooking it a few minutes afterwards lets the starch swell and thicken fully.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, thyme, port wine):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, thyme, port wine. 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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