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To Jug Hare

A stew of hare cooked with herbs, cloves, allspice, black pepper, onions, lemon peel, and thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Jug Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer

  1. Prepare the hare as for jugging.

  2. Place it in a stew-pan with herbs, cloves, allspice, black pepper, onions, and lemon peel.

  3. Cover with water and bring to a boil.

  4. Skim off any scum and let it simmer gently for about 2 hours until tender.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the hare and keep it warm by the fire.

  2. Rub together the butter and some flour to thicken the gravy.

  3. Stir the mixture into the gravy and let it boil for about 10 minutes.

  4. Strain the gravy over the hare and serve.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Hare
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the gravy and helps carry the thickening flour.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it boils with the butter.
Onions
Release sweetness and body into the cooking liquid during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture to the gravy. Flour must be cooked through while boiling, or the gravy keeps a raw, pasty taste and fails to thicken smoothly. Rubbing the flour into butter first helps prevent lumps.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, allspice, pepper, lemon, butter, flour. 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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