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Roast Hare

Roast Hare is a stuffed hare roasted with bacon and gravy, served with red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and red currant work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 495 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Roast Hare

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the hare

  1. Fill the hare's body with forcemeat and sew it securely with soft cotton.

  2. Truss the hare with hind legs forward and fore legs back, inserting skewers to keep the head in position.

  3. Place slices of fat bacon over the back and put the hare in a roasting tin.

Roast

  1. Baste with dripping and place in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C).

  2. Baste frequently to keep the skin moist; cooking time is about 1 hour and 15 minutes for a small hare and 2 hours for a large one.

  3. Towards the end, baste with butter instead of dripping.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Remove from the oven, take out the skewers, and place the hare on a hot dish.

  2. Pour the fat from the tin and prepare the gravy by frying minced onions in dripping, adding stock, and the hare's liver and heart if sweet.

  3. Add parsley, thyme, bay leaf, cinnamon, cloves, and mace to the gravy.

  4. Boil the gravy, strain a small quantity over the hare, and serve the rest in a tureen with red 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. Butter + red curranttop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together495 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Forcemeat
Fills the body, adding moisture and flavour as the hare cooks.
Fat bacon
Lies over the back, basting the meat and keeping it moist as it roasts.
Dripping
Carries heat over the surface and helps the skin brown and stay moist.
Butter
Added late for basting, it adds richness and promotes golden browning on the skin.
Red currant jelly
Its sharp sweetness balances the rich, gamey meat and gravy.

The step that matters

Baste frequently during roasting. Hare is lean, so the skin and surface dry out easily. Regular basting with fat keeps the meat moist and helps the surface brown evenly.

“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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