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Rolled Beef, to Eat Like Hare

Rolled beef stuffed with hare-style filling, roasted on a spit and served with gravy, butter, and red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Rolled Beef, to Eat Like Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut out the inside of the sirloin of beef.

  2. Soak the beef in red wine and vinegar for two days.

  3. Prepare stuffing as for hare and strew it over the beef.

  4. Roll and bind the beef tightly.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast on a hanging spit, basting with a mixture of vinegar and red port with pounded allspice.

  2. Serve with rich gravy, melted butter, and red currant jelly in separate dishes.

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. Red wine + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Beef + red winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,017 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Red wine + red curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Sirloin of beef
Forms the main meat that is stuffed, rolled and roasted.
Red wine
Soaks into the beef, adding flavour and helping tenderise the meat.
Vinegar
Acidity in the soaking and basting liquids helps tenderise the beef and adds tang.
Red port
Adds sweetness and depth to the basting mixture, helping the outside brown.

The step that matters

Roll and bind the beef tightly. A tight, even roll keeps the stuffing inside and helps the joint cook at an even rate. Loose binding lets stuffing escape and leaves uneven doneness.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, red wine, vinegar, milk, butter, flour, red currant):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, red wine, vinegar, milk, butter, flour, red currant. 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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