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Jugged Hare

A hare cooked in a sealed jar with vegetables, broth, brandy, and port, then thickened and served with stuffing balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Jugged Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

  1. Fry the pieces of hare in bacon fat.

  2. Place the hare in a jar or earthenware vessel that can be sealed.

  3. Add carrots, onions, celery, lemon juice, mignonette pepper, and salt.

  4. Pour in enough broth to cover the contents and add brandy.

Steam and finish

  1. Seal the jar securely and place it in a pan of cold water.

  2. Bring the water to a boil and steam the jar for 3 hours.

  3. After cooking, stir in port wine and red currant jelly until dissolved.

  4. Remove the jar from the hot water, strain the gravy, and remove the fat.

  5. Thicken the gravy with blood or a mixture of flour and butter.

  6. Pass the gravy through a tamis and pour it over the meat.

Serve

  1. Serve with stuffing balls fried in butter.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Pieces of hare
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during long, gentle steaming.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth that flavour the broth and gravy.
Broth
Keeps the meat moist and forms the base of the gravy during steaming.
Brandy
Adds aromatic depth and helps carry flavour through the long braise.
Port wine
Adds sweetness, body and colour to the finished gravy.
Flour and butter
Thicken the strained gravy so it coats the meat smoothly.

The step that matters

Sealing and steaming the jar. If the jar is not sealed tightly or the water boils dry, steam and liquid escape and the meat dries out. A steady, covered simmer in a water bath cooks the hare gently and keeps it moist.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, lemon, pepper, brandy, port wine, red currant):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, lemon, pepper, brandy, port wine, 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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