Home › The Principles of Cookery › HARE, JUGGED (Yorkshire mode)
HARE, JUGGED (Yorkshire mode)
Take half a pound of good forcemeat, and shape it into balls. Divide the hare into joints, and put them into a deep earthen jar, with a pound of beef steak and half a pound of fat bacon. Put the beef and hare in layers, and place the piece of bacon in the middle of them. Season as in the last recipe. Pour over the hare a pint of stock and a little of its blood. Cover the jar closely, and bake in a good oven for two hours and a half. Let the forcemeat balls be put in with the rest for the last half hour, and, ten minutes before the hare is served, add a glass of port. Be careful to lift the balls out gently, so as not to break them, and send red currant jelly to table on a glass dish. Probable cost, 5s. 6d., supposing the hare to cost 3s. 6d. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A sealed-vessel braise rather than a roast, and it behaves like one. The two points that decide the dish are the seal on the jar and the treatment of the blood.
- The jar is the methodAn earthen jar with a tight cover traps every bit of steam, so a pint of stock is enough to cook a whole hare. A deep casserole with a well-fitting lid, or a Dutch oven with foil crimped under the lid, does the same job; without a real seal the liquid will dry out well before two and a half hours are up.
- "A good oven"For a long, covered braise this is usually taken as a moderate oven, somewhere around 300 to 325F, though the book gives no figure. Much hotter and the meat sitting above the liquid will tighten and shred rather than come away from the bone.
- Hare and its substituteEuropean hare is dark, strong and sinewy, and in most places is game-dealer or specialist-butcher territory. A farmed rabbit is the usual stand-in but is much leaner and milder, and will be tender in about half the time, so check it at 75 to 90 minutes.
- The bloodTraditionally the blood is caught in the body cavity when the hare is paunched, and it thickens the gravy. A hare bought oven-ready will not have it. If you do have it, keep it cold, stir it in off the heat at the very end and do not let the sauce boil afterwards or it will curdle into grains.
- "Season as in the last recipe"The preceding recipe is not reproduced here, so the seasoning has to be inferred; the usual Victorian seasoning for jugged hare runs to salt, pepper, a little cayenne, an onion stuck with cloves, a bundle of parsley and thyme, a strip of lemon peel and a blade of mace. Season the layers as you build them, not just the top.
- ForcemeatVictorian forcemeat for game is breadcrumbs, shredded suet or minced fat bacon, the chopped liver, parsley, lemon zest and egg to bind. Half a pound makes roughly a dozen small balls. They are added only for the last half hour because longer in liquid disintegrates them.
- MeasuresA pint is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or just under 2.5 US cups. "A glass of port" means a wineglass, commonly reckoned at about 2 to 2.5 fl oz. The beef steak is there for flavour and body in the gravy as much as for eating.
- ServingEight or nine portions is realistic for a full-sized hare. The red currant jelly is not optional garnish; its sharpness is what balances the port and the richness of the bacon fat.
Jugging is generally traced to the vessel: a tall earthenware jug or jar, closely covered and often stood in a pan of simmering water rather than set in the oven, so the meat cooked in its own steam with almost no added liquid. The technique appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward and was applied to pigeons and steak as well as hare, though hare is the version that stuck. Thickening the gravy with the animal's own blood links the dish to the older European family of civets and jugged game preparations, and it is the step that most often gets left out of modern versions. Cassell's habit of quoting a "probable cost" he hare itself accounts for 3s. 6d. or households households budgeting a dinner as much as cooking one, and that a hare then was a seasonal purchase from a game dealer, not an unusual one.