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HARE, GATEAU OF (made with cold dressed Hare)
Take the flesh from the bones of a cold roast hare, remove the skin and sinews, cut it small, and pound it in a mortar with the liver of the hare. Take half the weight of the meat, in finely-grated bread-crumbs, soak them in as much good broth as they will absorb, and mix them with the pounded meat. Season with salt, pepper, and spices, according to taste, together with a finely-minced shallot, and a teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Add two well-beaten eggs. Cover the inside of a mould with slices of bacon. Put in the pounded meat, lay some more slices on the top, and bake in a moderate oven, or put it into a saucepan of boiling water, and let it simmer gently for an hour. Take away the bacon that surrounds it, and strew finely-grated bread-crumbs over it. This dish may be eaten either hot or cold. If eaten hot, a sauce should be sent to table with it made from the bones and trimmings of the hare, stewed in a little stock, seasoned, and flavoured. Time, an hour and a half to bake. Probable cost, 1s., exclusive of the cold hare.
This is a terrine in all but name, built to use up the drier remains of a roast hare. The hinge is moisture: hare is very lean, and the soaked crumb panade plus the bacon lining are what keep the loaf from turning to sawdust.
- Moderate ovenRead this as roughly 350F (175C); the book gives no temperature. The recipe's own timing is an hour and a half, but check the centre at 165F (74C) on a thermometer rather than trusting the clock.
- The boiling-water method"Put it into a saucepan of boiling water" means the mould goes into the water, covered and sealed, not the meat itself. Cover the mould tightly with foil and keep the water at a bare simmer at the mould's shoulder — a rolling boil will curdle the eggs and squeeze liquid out.
- Hare and its liverHare is sold frozen by game dealers; a whole one runs roughly 5-7 lb and may yield around 2 lb of cooked meat. Farmed rabbit works but is milder and even leaner, so add a little extra fat. If you have no liver from the same animal, chicken livers substitute; the liver is there for richness and depth, while the eggs and soaked crumb do the binding.
- ProportionsHalf the weight of the meat in breadcrumbs is a great deal of bread by modern terrine standards — the mixture will be soft and forgiving rather than densely meaty. Use dry, finely grated crumbs, not fresh, or the panade goes to paste.
- PoundingA food processor replaces the mortar. Pulse the cold meat rather than running it, and stop while some texture remains; overworked hare becomes gummy.
- Lining the mouldUse thin, unsmoked streaky bacon or pork back fat, overlapping the slices and letting them hang over the rim so they can be folded across the top. The recipe has you strip them off before serving, so their job is basting, not flavour — smoked bacon will dominate the hare.
- Serving hot or coldIf cold, cool it in the mould under a light weight (a can on a board) so it slices cleanly, then chill overnight. Hot, it wants the bone-and-trimming sauce, which is essentially a small brown game stock reduced and seasoned; a spoonful of redcurrant jelly or port is period-appropriate flavouring.
- YieldAbout six to eight servings as a first course, four as a main with potatoes and a sharp jelly.
- That priceOne shilling for the additions was a modest sum in the 1870s-90s, which is the point: the hare was already paid for, and this was a way to make a second dinner from it.
Gâteau here means simply "cake" in the older, savoury sense — a moulded, shaped thing — and the recipe reads as a domesticated English version of the French pain de gibier or game loaf, one of a family of pounded-meat dishes that also produced the quenelle and the terrine. Cassell's belongs to a generation of Victorian household dictionaries that treated leftovers as a genuine branch of cookery, with whole chapters of réchauffés; a roast hare was a substantial item, and letting the remains go to waste was a domestic failure. Hare was hedged about by the game laws for much of the nineteenth century, which is part of why it carried prestige on the table and why a book aimed at middle-class kitchens bothers to note the cost of the additions separately from the cost of the hare itself. The instruction to pound the flesh with the liver in a mortar is pre-mechanical technique of long standing — the same labour that forcemeats and fish quenelles demanded.