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Pot Hare

A hare cooked with butter, salt, mace, pepper, and its own gravy, then ground and baked in small pots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Pot Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Season the hare and bake it with butter.

  2. Once cooled, remove the meat from the bones and beat it in a mortar.

Season and pot

  1. If the mixture is not flavorful enough, add salt, mace, pepper, and melted fresh butter mixed with a spoonful or two of the hare's gravy.

  2. Mix well and place into small pots, covering with butter.

  3. Bake the legs and back at the bottom of the jar to keep them moist, placing the bones over them.

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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Hare
Provides the meat that forms the body of the potted mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and forms a seal over the pots.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the meat.
Gravy from the hare
Adds concentrated meat flavor and moisture to the beaten mixture.

The step that matters

Bake the legs and back at the bottom of the jar. Placing the meat at the bottom with bones over it helps keep it moist during baking, since dense cuts dry out when exposed directly to heat.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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