Skip to main content
Main

Liver Sauce for Roast Hare or Rabbit

A sauce made from hare or rabbit liver, stock, herbs, shallot, wine, vinegar or lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: White wine and port wine share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Liver Sauce for Roast Hare or Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the liver in brown stock for hare or white stock for rabbit until fully cooked.

  2. Pound the liver with a few herbs and a clove of shallot.

  3. Add vinegar or lemon juice and the appropriate wine to the gravy.

  4. Simmer the mixture and season with salt and pepper.

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. White wine + port winetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Port wine + curranttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together356 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Shallot + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Shallot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together881 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Liver
Breaks down when pounded to thicken the sauce and give it a rich, smooth body.
Shallot
Adds a mild aromatic savoriness that builds the flavor base of the sauce.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich liver and balances the wine.
Port wine
Adds depth, sweetness and body to the sauce when cooking hare.

The step that matters

Pound the liver with herbs and shallot. Pounding breaks the liver into fine particles so it blends smoothly into the gravy instead of leaving grainy lumps. Cooking the liver fully first also matters, because it is the only safe way to eat it.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, rabbit, clove, shallot, vinegar, white wine, port wine):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, rabbit, clove, shallot, vinegar, white wine, port wine. 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.

You might also like

Rabbit PattiesRabbit Patties6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes