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Hare, Fillets Of
Take a hare that has been already roasted, and cut the meat into fillets. Place these into a stewpan with some sauce poivrade (see POIVRADE SAUCE), make them very hot, but do not let them boil, and serve with sippets of fried toast.
This is a leftovers dish: cold roast hare sliced and warmed through in a peppery brown sauce. Everything depends on gentle heat.
- Do not let it boilThe meat is already cooked, so simmering only tightens the fibres and turns roast hare stringy and dry. Bring the sauce to a bare steam, slip in the fillets, and hold them below a simmer just until hot through.
- What a fillet means hereNot a butcher's cut but the long strips carved off the saddle, sliced on a slant; solid meat off the hind legs can be used the same way. Trim off any dried edges from the roast and discard sinew from the legs.
- Sourcing hareHare is a specialist order in most places now; it comes frozen from game dealers and is much darker and leaner than rabbit. Leftover roast venison, or the legs of a roast duck, take the same treatment; farmed rabbit is too mild and too dry to stand up to poivrade.
- Sauce poivradeIn Cassell's day this meant a brown sauce built on espagnole with a reduction of vinegar, mirepoix and crushed peppercorns, strained. A short cut that behaves the same way: reduce red wine vinegar with shallot, carrot and a spoonful of cracked black pepper, add good brown stock or demi-glace, simmer, strain, and finish with butter. The pepper should go in near the end or it turns harsh.
- StewpanA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan, not a casserole dish. Use a wide shallow pan so the slices sit in one layer and warm evenly.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp, arranged round the edge of the dish. Fry them at the last moment; they go soft within minutes of meeting the sauce.
- Quantity and servingThe meat from one roasted hare will serve about four as a main course, with sauce to suit. Season the finished sauce with salt after reducing, and add a little redcurrant jelly if the vinegar reads too sharp against the game.
Reheating a roast as a second dinner was a familiar habit of Victorian and Edwardian household cooking. Hare often came into the kitchen whole, so a saddle roasted on Sunday left plenty of dense dark meat to be carved and dressed on Monday. Poivrade is the standard French accompaniment to furred game, a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and coarse pepper, and it is generally traced to the medieval peppered vinegar sauces that were served with venison long before espagnole existed to thicken them. The instruction not to boil is the whole point of the entry: reheating already-roasted meat without ruining it.