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Civet of Hare

A stew of hare fillets cooked with bacon, butter, flour, claret, and consommé.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Civet of Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the hare

  1. Combine hare fillets, bacon squares, and butter in a sauté pan.

  2. Fry for 10 minutes.

  3. Stir in flour, then add claret and consommé.

  4. Boil for 10 minutes.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain the mixture.

  2. Wash the fillets in a glass of claret.

  3. Place the fillets in a clean stewpan.

  4. Pass the stock through a sieve.

  5. Add the strained stock to the stewpan.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Hare
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during the long simmer in wine and stock.
Streaky bacon
Releases fat and savoury flavour into the pan as it fries, seasoning the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying and adds richness and browning to the meat and bacon.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks into the wine and consommé.
Claret
Adds acidity and depth of flavour, and tenderises the meat during cooking.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 minutes after adding the claret and consommé. Boiling after the flour is stirred in lets the starch swell and thicken the liquid while the wine's flavour concentrates. Boiling too weakly can leave the sauce thin and floury-tasting.

“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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