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Hare with Quenelles

A hare dish served with quenelles, orange slices, and a sauce of stock, claret, and fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 25 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Hare with Quenelles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Cut fillets from the hare and lard them.

  2. Braise the fillets in stock with vegetables, cloves, and bouquet garni.

  3. Baste until the bacon turns pale brown.

Make the quenelles

  1. Combine leftover hare meat, eggs, brown sauce, fat bacon, pepper, salt, nutmeg, chopped mushrooms, butter, and flour to make quenelle meat.

  2. Pass the mixture through a wire sieve.

  3. Butter small molds.

  4. Fill the molds with quenelle meat.

  5. Steam for 20 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Chop hare bones and fry them in butter with bay leaf, thyme, garlic, and flour.

  2. Add stock, jelly, claret, juice, rind of orange, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne.

  3. Boil the sauce for 20 minutes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Turn out the quenelle molds onto a dish.

  2. Place fillets on top with thin orange slices in between, and add boiled cherries in the center.

  3. Strain the sauce and pour it over the dish.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 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 + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the quenelle meat so it holds its shape when steamed.
Flour
Thickens the butter and bone base of the sauce and binds the quenelle meat.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the quenelle meat and the frying of the bones.
Claret
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and gloss to the sauce, balancing its acidity.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and moisture to the quenelle meat.

The step that matters

Steam the quenelles gently in buttered molds. Eggs set as the quenelle meat heats. Steaming at a gentle heat sets the mixture evenly, while high heat can make it curdle, rubbery, or full of holes.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, egg, sauce, pepper, nutmeg, mushroom, butter):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, egg, sauce, pepper, nutmeg, mushroom, butter. 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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