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A Hare Boned and Larded

A hare larded with bacon, spices, and port wine, baked with bones and herbs, served with mushroom sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

A Hare Boned and Larded

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the hare

  1. Preheat your oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Bone the hare and coat it with egg.

  3. Season with pepper, spice, mushrooms, parsley, thyme, and shallots.

  4. Spread forcemeat over the hare, roll it tightly, and lard it thoroughly.

Braise

  1. In a stewpan, place the bones, ham, bay leaves, onions, thyme, parsley, and mace.

  2. Add the gravy and port wine, then cover the bones with fat bacon.

  3. Place the hare on top and cover it with more bacon.

  4. Cover the whole pan with white paper and simmer on low heat for 2 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the hare, strain the liquid, and skim off the fat.

  2. Use the strained liquid to make a sauce for the mushrooms.

  3. Serve the mushrooms on a dish, then place the hare on top.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Thyme + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 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
Forms the main meat, which becomes tender during slow simmering.
Egg
Binds the seasonings to the hare so they stay in place while it is rolled.
Forcemeat
Adds a moist, rich stuffing that keeps the rolled hare juicy as it cooks.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour as it melts into the liquid and bastes the hare.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the cooking liquid, which becomes the sauce.
Gravy
Adds body and savoury flavour to the cooking liquid used for the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the hare on low heat. Gentle, low heat lets the connective tissue in the hare break down slowly, making the meat tender. Boiling hard would toughen the meat and cloud the liquid.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, mushroom, parsley, thyme, shallot, ham):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, mushroom, parsley, thyme, shallot, ham. 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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