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Hare, Liver Sauce For
Simmer the liver for a quarter of an hour in good beef gravy, mince it finely, and with it a small onion. Add a dessert-spoonful of chilli vinegar, a table-spoonful of currant jelly, and three of port wine. Stir the sauce over the fire till hot, and serve. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the wine.
A small, sharp sauce meant to go alongside roast hare, built on the animal's own liver. It comes together in the time the joint rests.
- The hinge: mince, then reheat gentlyOnce the liver is simmered and chopped it wants only to be brought hot in the gravy. Boiling it hard after the port goes in drives off the wine and turns the liver grainy.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoon is about 2 teaspoons; a table-spoon here is roughly 1/2 fl oz (15 ml). So: 2 tsp chilli vinegar, 1 tbsp jelly, 3 tbsp port.
- The liverA hare's liver is small, a few ounces at most. If you are not butchering your own hare, two or three chicken livers stand in well; rabbit liver is closer in flavour but milder.
- Fifteen minutes is not too longThe quarter-hour simmer is longer than most liver cookery, and it firms the liver so it minces to a fine crumb rather than smearing. Doing it in gravy rather than water keeps it from drying.
- "Good beef gravy"Probably the strained roasting juices or a light beef stock rather than a thickened flour gravy. The recipe gives no quantity; around half a pint (about 285 ml) gives a pourable sauce, and reduce it first if it tastes thin.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies for a week or two. Cider vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce, or a pepper-infused vinegar, gets you to the same place.
- Currant jellyRedcurrant, not blackcurrant, and not the sweetened jam sold as currant preserve. It should melt into the sauce and leave a tart edge, not sweetness.
- The onionMince it raw with the liver as written and it will stay assertive. Softening it in a little butter first is a defensible modern change if you want the sauce rounder.
- Yield and costEnough for four or five as an accompaniment: a couple of spoonfuls each. The "4d." is given exclusive of the wine, so it covers only the liver, onion, vinegar and jelly.
Serving an animal's liver back with its own roasted flesh is one of the oldest economies in British game cookery, and by the nineteenth century it had hardened into convention: hare and rabbit came to the kitchen with the liver in place, and a cook who threw it away was wasting seasoning. The redcurrant jelly and port here are the standard Victorian grammar of game sauces — sweet-tart fruit and fortified wine to answer the strong, dark meat, the same pairing that survives in modern Cumberland sauce. Chilli vinegar was a common bottled condiment through much of the nineteenth century, sitting beside the mushroom ketchup and the anchovy essence, and largely vanished from domestic use in the twentieth century. In Cassell's the entry sits alphabetically under Hare, because a joint of hare was expected to arrive at table with something acid alongside, and this was the version that cost the household almost nothing.