Skip to main content
Main

Jugged Hare

A stew of hare pieces cooked with spices, stock, and port, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Jugged Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Cut the hare into shoulders, legs, and three back pieces.

  2. Daub the pieces well with fat bacon.

Stew

  1. Place them in a stewpan with the trimmings.

  2. Add allspice, mace, whole pepper, garlic, onions, bay leaves, parsley, thyme, and savory.

  3. Pour in veal stock and red port; simmer until nearly done.

  4. Remove the hare pieces and strain the liquid into another stewpan.

  5. Add butter and flour to thicken the sauce.

  6. Let it stew until tender, skim off the fat, and season with cayenne, salt, and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Allspice + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hare
Is the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow stewing.
Veal stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the flavour of the aromatics.
Red port
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce as it simmers.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and savoury depth to the stewing liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and body to the sauce when combined with flour.
Flour
Thickens the strained liquid into a sauce with body.

The step that matters

Let it stew until tender, then skim off the fat. Slow, gentle simmering breaks down the tough connective tissue in hare, so it must not boil hard or it can toughen and dry out. Skimming removes fat that would make the sauce greasy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (allspice, pepper, clove, garlic, onion, parsley, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against allspice, pepper, clove, garlic, onion, parsley, thyme. 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 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes