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Jugged Hare

A stew of hare and gravy beef, fried in butter, simmered in a jar with onion, lemon, spices, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Jugged Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Skin, paunch, and wash the hare, then cut it into pieces.

  2. Dredge the pieces with flour and fry them in boiling butter.

  3. Prepare 1½ pints of gravy from the beef, thickened with a little flour.

Stew

  1. Place the gravy in a jar and add the fried hare pieces, onion stuck with cloves, halved lemon, and season with pepper, cayenne, and salt.

  2. Cover the jar tightly and place it in a stewpan of boiling water, ensuring the water remains boiling.

  3. Let it stew until the hare is tender, about 2 to 4 hours depending on the age of the hare.

  4. When nearly done, pour in the port wine and add a few force‑meat balls that have been fried or baked.

Serve

  1. Serve with red‑currant jelly.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Hare
Forms the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle stewing.
Gravy beef
Its juices build the savoury gravy that the hare cooks in.
Butter
Frying the floured hare pieces in it browns the surface and adds richness.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the gravy and helps the floured hare pieces brown when fried.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Keeping the water boiling during the stew. The jar must stay in steadily boiling water so the hare cooks slowly and evenly. If the water drops, the meat cooks unevenly and needs far longer to become tender.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, onion, clove, pepper, port wine):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, onion, clove, pepper, 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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