Home › The Principles of Cookery › Hare, Hashed
Hare, Hashed
Take the remains of cold roast hare, and cut it into neat pieces. Put a pint of gravy into a saucepan with the trimmings of the hare, a table-spoonful of red-currant jelly, and salt and pepper, if necessary. Simmer gently for twenty minutes. If there is not so much as a pint of gravy remaining, it must be made up with water and stewed longer. Strain the gravy, and put it into a saucepan, and with it the pieces of hare dredged with flour, also a glass of port. Simmer for a quarter of an hour, then cut the forcemeat into slices, and put them into the gravy for three or four minutes, to get hot, then serve in a hot dish. Probable cost, exclusive of the cold meat and wine, 2d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian second-day dish built on the assumption that a roast hare left behind both meat and a well-flavoured gravy. The whole technique rests on reheating cooked meat gently in an already-finished sauce, not cooking it again.
- The hinge: gentle heat, short timeCold roast hare is lean and already cooked through; a hard simmer turns it stringy in minutes. Keep the pan at a bare tremble and treat the fifteen minutes as the outer limit rather than a target.
- "Gravy" here means stockIn this book gravy is the strained, savoury cooking liquor from the roast, or a good brown stock, not a thickened sauce from a packet. A pint is 20 fl oz Imperial, roughly 2.5 US cups; a well-reduced game or beef stock stands in acceptably.
- Sourcing hareWild hare is a seasonal game-dealer item in Britain and Europe and largely unavailable in US supermarkets. Farmed rabbit works with the same method, though it is milder and needs the redcurrant and port kept in balance rather than increased.
- The forcemeatA roast hare was traditionally stuffed with a suet-and-breadcrumb forcemeat, often with liver and herbs, which is why the recipe assumes you have some to slice. Without it, the dish is simply hashed hare; do not try to cook fresh forcemeat in the gravy, as it will disintegrate.
- A glass of portPeriod usage generally puts a wine glass at about 2 fl oz, so roughly 60 ml. Add it with the meat as directed so the raw alcohol has time to cook off without the sauce reducing to a syrup.
- Redcurrant jellyOne tablespoon is doing real work here, sweetening and glossing a lean, strong-flavoured meat. Any tart red jelly serves; avoid a heavily pectinised jam, which will thin oddly and taste of sugar.
- Dredging with flourThe light dusting on the meat is the only thickener in the dish and gives a sauce that just coats. If it stays thin, lift the meat out and reduce the gravy rather than adding more flour at the end.
- Cost and yieldThe tuppence covers only the bought-in extras -- the gravy ingredients and the jelly -- since the recipe states the price is exclusive of the cold meat and the wine; a reminder that this was thrift cookery around an expensive roast. Three to four servings holds true if the hash is served with mashed potato or a plain vegetable.
Hashes of this kind fill the back pages of Victorian cookery books because a roast hare was a substantial, occasional purchase and nothing from it was expected to be wasted: the carcass and trimmings went into the gravy, the leftover forcemeat was sliced and warmed, and even the price of the reheating was reckoned in pence. Redcurrant jelly with hare and venison is an old British pairing, generally traced to the practice of countering strong, lean dark meat with something sharp and sweet, and port was the standard fortified wine in an English household with a game dish on the table. Cassell's, published for a wide middle-class readership in the later nineteenth century, was as concerned with the economical afterlife of a joint as with the joint itself, and the arithmetic at the end of the entry is there to prove the point.