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Hare Cakes
Take the remains of cold roast hare, and mince the meat with a quarter of its weight in finely-shredded suet. Pound the mince in a mortar, and season rather highly with salt and cayenne. Bind it together with beaten egg and a little milk. The yolk of one egg and a table-spoonful of milk will be sufficient for a pound of hare. Make the mince up into small cakes, dip these in flour, and fry them in hot dripping or lard. Serve them on a hot dish, pour round them some gravy made with the bones and trimmings of the hare, and garnish the dish with toasted sippets. Time, five or six minutes to fry the cakes. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for three persons.
A leftovers dish: cooked hare, suet and egg fried into patties. It works with any dark game meat, and the only real difficulty is that hare is dry and needs the fat and the binding it is given here.
- If you have no hareSubstitute cooked rabbit, venison, duck legs or dark turkey meat. Rabbit is leaner and blander than hare, so lean harder on the cayenne and consider a spoonful of redcurrant jelly in the gravy.
- SuetShredded beef suet is still sold, fresh from butchers or as dried packet suet. Packet suet is coated in flour and works, though fresh is better here; cold grated butter or finely chopped pork back fat are reasonable stand-ins. Do not omit it — a quarter of the meat's weight in fat is what keeps the cakes from turning to sawdust.
- Pounding in a mortarA food processor does this in seconds. Pulse rather than run it continuously; you want a coarse paste with some texture left, not a smooth pâté.
- The bindingOne yolk and a tablespoon of milk per pound of meat is a light bind by modern habit. If the mixture will not hold a shape when squeezed, add a second yolk or a spoonful of fine breadcrumbs rather than more milk, which loosens it further.
- Dripping and heatBeef dripping or lard, about a quarter inch in the pan, over medium-high heat. Five or six minutes total, turned once, is right — the meat is already cooked and long frying only dries it out. Chill the shaped cakes for twenty minutes first and they will not break up.
- The gravyRoast the bones and trimmings, then simmer them with an onion, a carrot and water for an hour and reduce; a splash of port or red wine is in period and improves it. If you have no bones, good beef stock reduced with a little redcurrant jelly is the shortcut.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in the same fat and drained. Tuck them round the edge of the dish at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many cakes it makes; a pound of cooked meat with its suet will give roughly half a dozen. The book calls that enough for three, which is generous by today's portions if there are vegetables alongside.
Hare was a familiar part of the British game season, and a roast or jugged hare was a large, strongly flavoured joint that many households would not have finished at one sitting. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, like a number of late-Victorian compendia, carries a long tail of recipes for "the remains of cold" almost every meat in the book — rissoles, croquettes, moulds, potted pastes and cakes such as these. The technique is essentially that of the rissole or the French croquette: pounded cooked meat enriched with fat, bound with egg, shaped and fried, a way of making the second appearance of a joint look deliberate rather than apologetic. The suet is there for a specific reason: hare is very lean and its flesh dries further on reheating, so the fat is doing the work that a bit of pork usually does in a game terrine. The costing in pence, given "exclusive of the cold meat," is a reminder of what the book was for — household accounting as much as cooking, with the leftover joint treated as an asset already paid for.