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Jugged Hare

A hare cooked in a sealed jar with herbs, onion, wine, and lemon, served with sauce and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,150 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Jugged Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Wash the hare pieces and place them in a stone jar.

  2. Add sweet herbs, lemon peel, onion with cloves, wine, and lemon juice.

  3. Tie the jar tightly with a bladder to prevent steam from escaping.

Cook and finish

  1. Place the jar in a saucepan of boiling water, ensuring it is covered.

  2. Boil for nearly 3 hours.

  3. Remove the jar.

  4. Strain the gravy from the fat.

  5. Thicken the gravy with flour.

  6. Bring the sauce to a boil.

  7. Lay the hare on a dish.

  8. Pour the sauce over the hare.

  9. Serve with 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 + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Wine + curranttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Clove + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Hare
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender during long, gentle cooking.
Port or claret wine
Adds acidity and aroma that help tenderise the meat and flavour the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps tenderise the meat.
Flour
Thickens the strained gravy so it coats the hare.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Sealing the jar before boiling. The bladder tie keeps steam inside the jar, so the hare cooks in its own juices and wine rather than drying out. A loose seal lets moisture escape and leaves the meat dry and the gravy weak.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, onion, clove, wine, flour):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, onion, clove, wine, flour. 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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