Skip to main content
Main

Potted Hare

A hare cooked with bacon, herbs, and spices, then ground with bacon and clarified butter, stored in potting pots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Potted Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Skin the hare, empty it, wash it, and cut it down the middle.

  2. Place the hare in a stewpan with bacon slices underneath and on top.

  3. Add the remaining ingredients to the stewpan.

Stew

  1. Stew gently until the hare is tender and the meat separates easily from the bones.

Pot the meat

  1. Remove the hare from the stewpan and take out the bones.

  2. Pound the meat with the bacon in a mortar until smooth.

  3. If needed, add cayenne, salt, and pounded mace, and ensure the spices are well mixed.

  4. Press the meat into potting pots.

  5. Pour clarified butter over the meat.

  6. Store in a dry place.

  7. Save the cooking liquid for hashes, soups, etc.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Hare
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and firm enough to pound into a paste.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor that carries into the pounded meat.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the cooking liquid, deepening the flavor of the meat.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the meat separates from the bones. Slow, gentle heat breaks down connective tissue so the meat becomes tender. Boiling hard toughens the muscle fibers and can leave the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, allspice, carrot, pepper, sherry):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, allspice, carrot, pepper, sherry. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes