Why it works: Butter and red currant work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 495 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. 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 the hare
Fill the hare's body with forcemeat and sew it securely with soft cotton.
Truss the hare with hind legs forward and fore legs back, inserting skewers to hold the head in place.
Place slices of fat bacon over the back to keep it moist.
Roast
Put the hare in a roasting tin, drizzle with dripping, and place in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C).
Baste frequently to keep the skin moist.
Roast a small hare for 1 hour and 15 minutes, or a large one for 2 hours.
Towards the end, baste with butter instead of dripping.
Make the gravy and serve
Remove from the oven, take out the skewers, and place on a hot dish.
Pour the fat from the tin, prepare gravy by frying minced onions in dripping, adding stock, liver, heart, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, cinnamon, and cloves.
Boil the gravy, strain a small amount over the hare, and serve the rest in a tureen with red currant jelly.
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.
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Butter + red curranttop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together495 recipes
Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Hare
- Forms the main meat, which is kept moist by bacon and repeated basting while it roasts.
- Forcemeat
- Fills the body, adding moisture and flavour as the hare cooks through.
- Fat bacon
- Lies over the back, slowly melting to baste the meat and keep it moist.
- Dripping
- Fat for roasting and basting that promotes gentle browning of the skin.
- Butter
- Added near the end of roasting to enrich the skin with flavour and browning.
- Red currant jelly
- Adds sweet-tart acidity that balances the rich, gamy flavour of the meat.
The step that matters
Keep the hare basted and check doneness by time. Hare is lean and dries out easily, so frequent basting with fat keeps the skin and flesh moist while the connective tissue softens and the meat cooks evenly through the thick body.
“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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