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Potted Hare

A hare cooked in butter and spices, then mashed and packed into small pots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Potted Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Season the hare and bake it with butter.

  2. Once cooled, remove the meat from the bones and beat it in a mortar.

Pot and seal

  1. If needed, add salt, mace, pepper and melted fresh butter.

  2. Mix well and place into small pots, covering with butter.

Bake in the jar

  1. Bake the legs and back at the bottom of the jar to keep them moist, placing the bones on top.

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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 meat that is pounded into a smooth, spreadable texture.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the flavour and seals the surface of the potted meat.
Hare gravy
Adds moisture and concentrated meaty flavour to the mixture.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour.

The step that matters

Covering the pots with butter. A layer of melted butter excludes air from the surface of the meat, which helps protect the potted mixture and keeps it from drying out.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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