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Civet of Hare

A slow‑cooked hare stew with bacon, onions, wine, stock, and vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and artichoke share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Civet of Hare

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan and add diced bacon. Cook gently with onions until golden.

  2. Remove bacon and onions from the pan, then add hare pieces and cook.

  3. In a bowl, mix stock with flour until smooth. Add claret and enough additional stock to cover the hare.

  4. Return bacon and onions to the pan, along with mushrooms, parsnip, bouquet garni, and artichoke bottoms.

  5. Simmer until hare is tender and flavors meld.

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. Parsnip + artichoketop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + artichoketop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Flour + parsniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + artichoketop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together447 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 slow simmering.
Flour
Thickens the stock and wine into a smooth sauce.
Claret (red wine)
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the sauce.
Bacon
Releases fat and savoury flavor into the butter and onions.
Butter
Carries the cooking of the bacon and onions and adds richness.

The step that matters

Simmer until the hare is tender. Hare is lean and firm, so it needs long, gentle simmering to break down its connective tissue. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can make the sauce cloudy, so keep the liquid at a slow bubble.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, red wine, mushroom, parsnip, artichoke):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, red wine, mushroom, parsnip, artichoke. 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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