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Hare Cutlets

Roasted hare cutlets coated in egg yolk and breadcrumbs, sautéed in clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Hare Cutlets

12 cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hares

  1. Prepare the hares for roasting and keep the blood.

  2. Detach the fillets from the hares without separating them from the legs.

  3. Cut each fillet into three parts on the bias, flatten gently, and shape into cutlets (12 total).

Shape and coat

  1. Run a shank through each cutlet and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Brush each cutlet lightly with egg yolk and coat with fine breadcrumbs.

  3. Soak the cutlets in very hot clarified butter and breadcrumb them again.

  4. Lightly pass a knife over them to gloss.

Cook and serve

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan and sauté the cutlets like ordinary cutlets.

  2. Place a frill of paper around each cutlet and serve with sauce.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Hares
Provide the lean meat that forms the cutlets and their structure.
Egg yolk
Binds the breadcrumb coating so it adheres to the cutlet.
Fine breadcrumbs
Form a crisp coating that browns when the cutlets are sautéed.
Clarified butter
Adds richness and helps the second breadcrumb coating brown evenly.

The step that matters

Soaking in very hot clarified butter before the second breadcrumbing. If the butter is not very hot, the cutlets absorb fat slowly, and the second coating may not adhere or crisp well. Hot fat sets the surface and helps the crumbs stick.

“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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