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Hare, Batter for Basting
Beat the yolks of two eggs, and the white of one. Mix smoothly with them two table-spoonfuls of flour, and add a pinch of salt, a tablespoonful of oil, and a pint of milk. When the hare is about three-parts roasted, baste it with the batter, until the latter stiffens, and forms a covering over the hare. Care must be taken not to let this burn. Time a few minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for one hare.
A coating batter rather than a dish in itself, meant to build up in thin layers over a roasting hare and protect very lean meat from drying. The whole point is repetition: you are painting on successive films, not pouring on a crust.
- The hinge: build it in coatsWait until the batter already on the meat has set before adding more, and keep the layers thin. Applied in one heavy pour it slides off and scorches in the dripping pan instead of clinging to the saddle and legs.
- The pint is imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, about 2.5 US cups. With only two tablespoonfuls of flour to that quantity of milk the batter is very thin indeed — thinner than crepe batter, closer to a pourable milk-and-egg wash — so it can be brushed or ladled on without sitting in a mass.
- "Three-parts roasted"About three-quarters of the way through the cooking time, so roughly the final quarter of the roast. No oven temperature is given in the recipe. Earlier than that and the coating dries to leather long before the meat is done.
- Preventing the burnMove the roast to a lower shelf once the batter goes on, and tent loosely with foil if the surface colours faster than it sets. Sugarless as it is, the batter still browns quickly from the egg and milk.
- The oilThe recipe does not specify a type. Use a neutral oil, or melted butter if you want more flavour.
- Quantity and yield"Sufficient for one hare" means a whole animal of roughly 5-7 lb, serving six. Expect a good deal of batter to end up in the pan; that is normal and gives body to the gravy if you skim the fat first.
- If you are using rabbitFarmed rabbit is smaller and not as lean as hare, so it needs less batter and a shorter roast; scale the mix down accordingly.
- The cost note"Probable cost, 5d." is 5 pence in pre-decimal money, an editorial habit of the book rather than anything usable. Ignore it.
Hare is among the leanest of game meats, with almost no intramuscular fat, and the Victorian kitchen dealt with that problem in three ways: larding with strips of bacon fat, near-constant basting with butter and dripping, or — as here — sealing the joint under a batter shell. The technique belongs to the same family of thinking as the flour-and-water paste crusts used to protect fish and joints in earlier English cookery, and to Yorkshire pudding batter set beneath a roast to catch the fat. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical reference whose editions run from the later nineteenth century into the early twentieth, files this among its hare entries because a household with a shooting connection or a good game dealer might see hare regularly through autumn and winter, and needed several ways to handle it. That its entry ends with a price in pence is characteristic: the book was written for cooks who had to answer to a housekeeping account.