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Hare, Mutton Gravy For
Cut a pound of the scrag of mutton in pieces; brown them in a little butter, and pour over them a pint and a half of boiling water. Let the gravy boil up, add two cloves, half an inch of cinnamon, a pinch of mixed herbs, with pepper and salt. Simmer gently an hour or more. Strain the gravy, free it from fat, thicken it, add a gill of port, and serve in a tureen.
A sauce, not a dish: a strong mutton stock reduced and fortified with port, meant to be poured over roast hare, whose own lean flesh yields almost no drippings. Everything depends on getting real colour on the meat first.
- Brown properlyMuch of the flavour here comes from the fond on the bottom of the pan, so let the mutton pieces sit undisturbed until they are genuinely dark, not merely grey. Adding the boiling water, as the recipe directs, then lifts that colour into the liquid.
- Scrag of muttonScrag is the bony upper neck. Mutton (sheep over about two years) is hard to buy; ask a butcher for lamb neck or neck bones, and accept that the gravy will be milder and will need longer reduction to reach the same intensity.
- A gillIn this British book a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or 2/3 cup. Use a tawny or ruby port rather than anything sweet and syrupy.
- A pint and a halfAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is about 30 fl oz, roughly 3 3/4 cups. After an hour of simmering, expect to strain off something closer to two cups.
- Thicken itNo quantity is given. A roux of one level tablespoon each of butter and flour per cup of strained stock gives a light coating consistency; whisk the hot stock into the roux off the heat, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the flour.
- Port goes in lastAdd the wine after thickening and give it only a minute or two of heat. Long boiling drives off the aroma and leaves a flat, slightly bitter edge behind.
- Spicing is deliberately lightTwo cloves and half an inch of cinnamon in a pint and a half of liquid is a background note, not a spiced sauce. Resist scaling it up, and strain the spices out with the rest of the solids.
- Degrease seriouslyMutton fat sets hard and tastes of tallow when it cools on the plate. Chill the strained stock and lift the cap off if time allows; otherwise skim, then blot the surface with paper.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to sauce a hare for six to eight. It keeps three days refrigerated and freezes well.
Hare is exceptionally lean and dark, and a roasted one gives up almost nothing in the way of pan juices, so nineteenth-century cooks built a separate gravy to serve alongside it — usually with redcurrant jelly on the table as well. Mutton was the logical base: cheap, strongly flavoured, and gelatinous at the neck, it stood up to game in a way that veal or chicken stock could not. The clove, cinnamon and port belong to an older English tradition of sweet-spiced meat sauces that survived longest with venison and hare, dishes still associated with the gentleman's table when Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and revised through the end of the century. The entry itself is titled "Hare, Mutton Gravy For", filed alphabetically under Hare.