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Roast Hare

Roast hare stuffed with forcemeat, bacon, and spices, served with gravy and red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. 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

  1. Prepare forcemeat and fill the hare's body, sewing it securely with soft cotton.

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

  3. Cover the back with slices of fat bacon and place the hare in a roasting tin.

Roast

  1. Add dripping on top and roast in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C).

  2. Baste frequently to keep the skin moist; cooking time is about 1¼ hours for a small hare and 2 hours for a large one.

  3. In the last moments, baste with butter instead of dripping.

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

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Pour off the fat from the tin and prepare gravy by frying minced onions in dripping.

  2. Add stock, liver, heart, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, cinnamon, cloves, and mace to the onions.

  3. Boil the mixture, strain a small amount 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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together369 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 is kept moist by basting during the long roast.
Forcemeat
Fills the body, adding flavour and moisture as the hare cooks.
Fat bacon slices
Cover the back and melt slowly, basting the meat and keeping it moist.
Dripping
Fat that browns the skin and carries flavour into the gravy base.
Onions
Fried in dripping to build the savoury, sweet base of the gravy.
Stock
Liquid that turns the onions and drippings into a thin gravy.

The step that matters

Baste frequently during the roast. Basting keeps the skin moist and helps it brown evenly, since the lean meat can dry out over the long cooking time.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, liver, parsley, thyme, cinnamon, clove):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, liver, parsley, thyme, cinnamon, 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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