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Rabbit or Old Hare Soup

A hearty soup made with rabbit, salt pork, onion, celery, parsley, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, sherry, lemon juice, and brown roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Rabbit or Old Hare Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Fry the onion in the dripping until lightly browned.

  2. Add the pieces of rabbit and cover with cold water.

  3. Cook very slowly for 4 hours, or until the meat is tender.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, then let cool.

Strain and finish

  1. Skim off the fat and strain through a coarse cloth.

  2. Return the liquid to the fire and bring to a boil.

  3. Thicken with the roux, then add the ketchup, sherry, lemon juice, and a pinch of ground allspice if desired.

  4. If the soup is not brown enough, color with a little caramel.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  4. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Onion
Browns in the dripping to build a savory, sweet base for the soup.
Brown roux
Thickens the liquid so the soup has body.
Brown sherry
Adds acidity and a rounded, aromatic depth to the finished soup.
Dripping
Carries the onion's browning and adds fat for flavor.

The step that matters

Cook very slowly for 4 hours. Low, gentle heat lets the connective tissue in the rabbit break down slowly, so the meat turns tender without drying out or toughening. Boiling hard would make the meat tough and cloud the broth.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pork, onion, celery, sauce, tomato, ketchup):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pork, onion, celery, sauce, tomato, ketchup. 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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