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HARE PATE (en Terrine)
Bone a hare; take one pound of fillet of veal, one pound of fresh lean pork, a little beef fat, parsley, chives, thyme, a bay-leaf, pepper, cloves, and (if liked) garlic. Chop them all up very small. Line a small wide-mouthed dish, the lid of which shuts closely, with slices of bacon; put in the hare, etc., mixed with half a pound of bacon cut into pieces; pour a glass of brandy over it; cover it with slices of bacon, and close up the lid carefully with paste. Let it bake four hours.
A classic French game terrine, written for a cook who already knew what a terrine looked like and how to seal one. The proportions are sound; the timing and the sealing method are what need translating.
- The hinge: the flour seal"Close up the lid carefully with paste" means luting — a stiff flour-and-water dough pressed round the join so no steam escapes. It is not eaten. A double layer of foil crimped tight under the lid does the same job, and without it the mixture dries and the fat renders out.
- A glass of brandyIn Victorian cookery writing a wine glass is roughly 2 fl oz, a tumbler more like 8. For this quantity of meat, 2 to 4 fl oz is the sensible reading; more than that and the alcohol dominates the game.
- Oven and timeFour hours implies a slack, falling oven rather than a thermostatic one. Modern practice is a moderate oven, 325F, with the terrine standing in a bain-marie of hot water, until the centre reaches 160F — typically two to two and a half hours for a terrine of this size.
- Bacon here means fat, not smokeThe lining and the diced pieces are standing in for barding fat. Unsmoked streaky bacon or, better, thin sheets of pork back fat will give the intended result; heavily smoked supermarket bacon will overwhelm the hare.
- Boning a hareA hare yields roughly 3 lb of meat off the bone, most of it dark and sinewy. The saddle can be reserved and laid in whole as a centre strip; the legs and shoulder are the part to chop. Keep the bones for stock. Ordering ahead from a game dealer or butcher is usually necessary.
- Chop, do not purée"Chopped very small" is hand-chopped or coarsely minced. A food processor turns this into a paste and the terrine loses its texture entirely. Pulse briefly if you use one, and keep the meat and fat very cold.
- Season more than you thinkThe recipe gives "pepper" and no salt figure. A forcemeat eaten cold needs about 1.5 percent salt by weight of meat — roughly 1 oz per 4 lb. Fry a spoonful and taste it before filling the dish.
- Cooling and keepingThe original assumes the terrine is eaten cold. Weight it lightly as it cools so it slices, then refrigerate at least 24 hours before cutting; the flavour is markedly better on the third day. It keeps about a week refrigerated.
- YieldA large terrine: on these quantities, upwards of 4 lb of finished terrine, enough for 12 to 16 portions as a first course with bread and something sharp.
Terrine is simply the earthenware dish, and for centuries the name of the dish and the name of what was cooked in it were interchangeable; pâté properly meant the same forcemeat baked in a pastry case, which is why the two words drift together in nineteenth-century books. Hare suited the method: strongly flavoured, cheap in season, and tough enough to need long slow cooking. The veal and pork are there for mildness and moisture, since hare alone bakes dry and dark. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s for middle-class English households with a servant or two, carried a great many such recipes taken more or less directly from French practice and left with their French tags attached.