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Roasted Leveret

Roasted leveret stuffed with breadcrumbs, suet, parsley, thyme, and eggs, then roasted with bacon, butter, and served with gravy and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Roasted Leveret

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stuff

  1. Stuff the leveret with a mixture of bread crumbs, beef suet, parsley, lemon thyme, and eggs.

  2. Spit the leveret and cover the back with thin slices of fat bacon.

Roast and baste

  1. Roast over a fire, dredging with flour.

  2. Baste with warm milk until three-quarters done.

  3. Add fresh butter to the dripping pan.

  4. Finish roasting until done.

Serve

  1. Serve with gravy, melted butter, and melted currant jelly.

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Leveret
Provides the main meat, which is cooked by slow roasting over a fire.
Bread crumbs
Absorb juices from the stuffing, helping keep the meat moist and tender.
Beef suet
Adds fat to the stuffing, carrying flavour and moisture through the meat as it roasts.
Eggs
Bind the stuffing so it holds together during roasting.
Fat bacon (in the method)
Covers the back and bastes the meat with melting fat, keeping it moist and browned.
Flour
Dusted over the meat to help form a browned, crisp surface.

The step that matters

Baste with warm milk until three-quarters done. Milk browns and sweetens the surface through its milk sugars and proteins, while the basting keeps the lean meat from drying out. Stopping too early or too late changes the balance.

Swap the thyme

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, beef, parsley, lemon, egg, flour, milk):

  1. Marjoramfits about as well
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Thymethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, beef, parsley, lemon, egg, flour, milk. 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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