Skip to main content
Main

Jugged Hare

A stew of hare pieces cooked with wine or water, orange or lemon juice, onion, cloves, herbs, and orange rind, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Jugged Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the hare thoroughly and cut it into serving pieces.

  2. Place the pieces in a jugging pot or stone jar.

  3. Add sweet herbs, lemon or orange rind, onion with cloves, and water or wine.

  4. Seal the jar tightly with a bladder to prevent steam from escaping.

Steam

  1. Place hay in a saucepan, set the jar on top, and fill with water to within 4 inches of the jar's top.

  2. Boil the water for about 3 hours, ensuring it remains boiling and topping up as needed.

Finish and serve

  1. Once tender, strain the gravy from the fat and thicken it with flour, then bring to a boil.

  2. Serve the hare in a soup dish and pour the gravy over it.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Port wine + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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 moist cooking.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the strained gravy so it coats the hare rather than running thin.
Claret or port wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the liquid that braises the meat.
Onion
Studded with cloves, it releases aromatic sweetness into the gravy during cooking.

The step that matters

Keeping the water boiling during steaming. The sealed jar cooks by gentle steam and the surrounding water must stay at a steady boil. If it drops, the hare cooks too slowly and may not become tender within the stated time.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, orange, clove, lemon):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, orange, clove, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes