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Jugged Hare

A stew of hare with carrots, onions, turnips, herbs, butter, flour, stock, port wine, and red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Jugged Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the onion, carrot, and turnip.

  2. Fry them in the butter in a stewpan with the herbs.

  3. Joint the hare into neat pieces and add it to the vegetables.

Stew

  1. Let it simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Mix the flour into a thin paste with a little stock. Stir the paste into the hare.

  3. Add the rest of the stock.

  4. Cook slowly for 1 hour.

  5. Just before serving, add the port wine and red currant jelly.

Serve

  1. Serve the hare neatly, straining the sauce over it.

  2. Add forcemeat balls if desired.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Port wine + red curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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 through long, gentle simmering.
Butter
Fats the vegetables as they fry, carrying flavour and browning them lightly.
Flour
Mixed into stock as a paste, it thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the sauce when stirred in near the end.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity tartness that balances the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the hare. Flour must be smoothed into a thin paste with liquid first; added dry or in lumps, it clumps and leaves the sauce uneven. Stirring it in evenly lets starch thicken the liquid smoothly as it simmers.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, onion, turnip, butter, flour, port wine):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, onion, turnip, butter, flour, 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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