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Roast Leverets

Roasted leverets seasoned with butter, salt, flour, and served with a red currant jelly and lemon gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Roast Leverets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Truss the leverets as you would a hare.

  2. Lard the backs with bacon.

  3. Melt ¼ cup of butter and pour it over the leverets.

  4. Cover the backs with well-buttered paper.

Roast

  1. Roast in front of a clear fire, basting frequently.

  2. Ten minutes before they finish, sprinkle with salt.

  3. Ten minutes before they finish, sift flour over them.

Finish and serve

  1. Once done, remove the skewers and the string.

  2. Place the leverets on a hot dish.

  3. Make gravy by dissolving red currant jelly in the drippings, adding a few drops of lemon juice.

  4. Pour some gravy around the leverets.

  5. Serve the rest of the gravy in a sauceboat.

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. Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + red curranttop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together495 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Leverets
The main meat; roasting firms its protein and browns its surface.
Butter
Adds fat that carries heat over the surface, promoting browning and moisture.
Larding bacon
Fat threaded into the backs that keeps the lean meat moist and adds flavor.
Flour
Dusted over the surface, it helps form a browned crust and thickens the drippings.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and body to the gravy made from the drippings.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich drippings and balances the sweet jelly.

The step that matters

Basting frequently while roasting. Regular basting coats the surface with melted fat and juices, keeping the lean meat moist and helping the outside brown evenly instead of drying out.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, lemon. 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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