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A Curry of Hare or Rabbit
To three pounds of dressed hare, half a cupful of butter, two large onions, one tablespoonful of curry powder, cayenne pepper, salt, one cupful of wine. Put the butter and the hare (which has been cut in small pieces) on the fire, stir until brown; add to it a teaspoonful of flour, the onions, chopped fine, curry powder, salt, cayenne, a bay leaf, and the wine; stir well, cover, and let the whole simmer for about an hour. To be eaten with boiled rice. -Mrs. Granlees.
A straightforward braise: brown the meat in butter, build a curry base around it, and let it go for an hour. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- "Dressed hare"Dressed means skinned and cleaned — three pounds of ready-to-cook meat, not live weight (the recipe has you cut it into small pieces yourself). A whole rabbit yields roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb, so buy two, or use bone-in rabbit legs and saddle.
- Hare and rabbit are not interchangeableHare is dark, strongly flavoured and considerably tougher; farmed rabbit is pale and mild. Hare will want closer to two hours of simmering, rabbit an hour or slightly less. Wild rabbit sits between the two.
- Half a cupful of butterThat is 4 oz, or one stick — generous but correct for the period, and it doubles as the sauce base. You can cut it to 3 tablespoons for browning without losing the dish.
- The wineUnspecified, as was common. A dry white or a light red both work; Madeira or sherry would also be plausible in a household of this kind and gives the richer result with hare.
- One tablespoon of curry powderThe book's own blend is not reproduced here, but home-mixed powders of the period tended to lean on turmeric and coriander and to be lighter on heat than many commercial powders today. Bloom it in the fat for thirty seconds before the liquid goes in — dry powder stirred into a wet pan tastes raw and dusty.
- A teaspoonful of flourThat is a very light thickening for three pounds of meat, and it is meant to be. Expect a loose, buttery sauce rather than a gravy; if you want it thicker, reduce it uncovered at the end rather than adding more flour.
- DonenessRabbit and hare are lean and go stringy if pushed past tender. Test a leg at 50 minutes: the meat should pull from the bone with light pressure. Keep the pot at a bare simmer, not a boil.
- YieldServes four to five with rice. The bones are small and numerous, so warn anyone at the table who has not eaten rabbit before.
Curries of this kind — a domestic English or American braise built on a tin or jar of curry powder rather than whole spices ground to order — were long since standard, and cookbooks of the period print them alongside stews and hashes without treating them as foreign. The reflex to curry game is a practical one: hare has a strong, faintly liver-like flavour and older animals are tough, and both spice and a long moist braise answer those problems at once. That this book supplies its own curry powder formula is worth noting; commercial blends were widely sold, but the inclusion of a formula suggests some households still mixed their own, which may be why period curries vary so much in colour and heat. The attribution to Mrs. Granlees suggests the compiled community cookbook, where recipes were gathered by name from contributors and printed largely as submitted — which would explain the unspecified wine and the assumption that the reader already knows how to joint a hare.