Name: To Dress a Jugged Hare
Ingredients: 1 hare, cut into small pieces; 2 ounces lard, cut into small slips; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 2 blades of mace; 1 onion, stuck with cloves; a bundle of sweet herbs

Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

To Dress a Jugged Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hare

Lard the hare pieces with slips of lard and season with pepper and salt.
Place the hare in an earthen jug with mace, the clove-studded onion, and sweet herbs.
Cover the jug tightly to prevent anything from getting in.

Cook and serve

Set the jug in a pot of boiling water and cook for 3 hours.
Turn the contents out onto a dish, remove the onion and sweet herbs, and serve hot.

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.

Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together16,901 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,257 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace 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 main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle cooking in the jug.
Lard: Adds fat that keeps the lean meat moist and carries flavour through the cooking.

The step that matters

Cooking the sealed jug in boiling water. The jug must be tightly covered and kept in gently boiling water for the full time. A sealed container traps moisture so the meat braises in its own juices rather than drying out, and the long, steady heat breaks down tough connective tissue.

Swap the onion

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

Carrotfits better
Capsicumfits better
Parsnipfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mace, clove. 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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To Dress a Jugged Hare