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To Roast a Hare with Cream Sauce

A hare roasted and basted with milk, butter, and flour, finished with a cream sauce made from the hare's liver.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Roast a Hare with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing and liver

  1. Boil the liver and chop it finely.

  2. Mix a small portion of the liver with the stuffing and reserve the rest for the sauce.

  3. Place the sweet herbs in a roasting pan.

Roast the hare

  1. Pour 1 quart of milk over the herbs.

  2. Baste the hare continually with the milk.

  3. When the hare is more than half roasted, remove the milk.

  4. Add another quart of milk to the herbs.

  5. Slit the neck of the hare to allow gravy to run into the milk.

  6. Skewer the head down again.

  7. Continue basting with milk until 20 minutes before serving.

  8. Remove the milk.

  9. Baste the hare with butter.

  10. Dredge the hare with flour twice during this time.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Combine the two quantities of milk.

  2. Stir in butter and flour.

  3. Add the chopped liver.

  4. Warm the sauce over low heat.

  5. Stir constantly without boiling.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + livertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Milk
Basting and forming the base of the sauce, adding moisture and a creamy body as it reduces.
Butter
Basting adds fat for richness and browning, and enriches the sauce.
Flour
Dredging browns the surface, and stirred into the sauce it thickens the liquid.
Liver
Adds savoury, rich flavour to the stuffing and the sauce.

The step that matters

Warm the sauce over low heat without boiling. Milk thickened with flour can scorch or curdle if it boils hard. Gentle heat and constant stirring keep the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

“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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