Home › The Principles of Cookery › Hare, Potted
Hare, Potted
Skin a hare and cut it into joints. Divide two pounds of bacon into square pieces of about two inches, and fry them in three ounces of butter. Put into the pan with them the pieces of hare, a small sprig of parsley, thyme, and sweet marjoram, two bay-leaves, a shallot, eight cloves, one blade of mace, a pinch of cayenne, a dozen peppercorns, and a little salt, if required. Fry them for a few minutes, then moisten with half a pint of good gravy. Cover the pan closely, and simmer gently for an hour and a half. Drain the pieces of hare from the liquid, pick the meat from the bones, remove the skin and sinew, mince it finely, and pound it in a mortar. Mix with it the fat and bacon, also pounded, and taste if the paste is sufficiently seasoned. Add the liquid, first boiling it down till it is reduced to three-quarters of a pint, and then passing it through a hair sieve. Put the mixture into jars, cover these with a coarse paste of flour and water, and bake in a moderate oven for an hour. Take them out, and, when cool, cover the jars with melted lard or butter and afterwards with bladder. If prepared in this way and kept in a cool place, the hare will keep good for several weeks. Probable cost, 6s. 6d., supposing the hare to cost 3s. 6d. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons.
This is a preserve, not a dish for the same day: the whole point of the method is that the sealed jars sit in a larder for weeks. That is where it fails now, and the failure is not a matter of taste.
- Why this one is unsafeA low-acid meat paste, packed dense, baked in a covered jar and then sealed under a cap of fat and a skin of bladder, is a textbook anaerobic environment. Clostridium botulinum spores survive an hour in an oven at the temperatures a jar of paste actually reaches, and the sealed fat layer then gives them exactly the oxygen-free conditions they need. Storage in a "cool place" — a Victorian larder, not a refrigerator — is well within the range at which the organism grows.
- No cure, no measurementThere is no nitrite, no measured salt concentration and no acidification here; salt is added only "if required". Nothing in the formula limits bacterial growth once the jars cool, and the toxin may be present with no smell, no gas and no off taste to warn a cook.
- The bladder sealDried bladder, soaked and tied over the jar mouth, shrinks as it dries into a tight-fitting cover. It was a common closure before glass canning jars, and it is effective at excluding air — which is the problem, not the protection.
- Reheating does not fix itBotulinum toxin is destroyed by sustained boiling, but potted meats of this kind were eaten cold, spread on bread. Nothing in the intended use of the finished paste involves heat at all.
- If you want potted hareUse a current recipe written for refrigeration, treating the result as a fresh product with a few days' life, not a preserve. Do not adapt the times and temperatures given above.
- Reading the originalHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in British measure, about 1¼ US cups; the reduction to three-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz. "Coarse paste of flour and water" is huff paste — a sacrificial flour-and-water lid that sealed the jar during baking and was thrown away. 6s. 6d. is six shillings and sixpence, with the hare alone at 3s. 6d., roughly half the total cost of the dish.
- The hare itselfBrown hare is game, not butcher's meat, and its sale in Britain is restricted (in England and Wales the Hares Preservation Act 1892 bars sale from March to July; Scotland has a statutory close season); it is sold by game dealers rather than supermarkets. The dark, strongly flavoured flesh is what the bacon, mace and cayenne here are balancing.
Potting was the standard English answer to a glut of meat before canning: cook it down, pound it to a paste, pack it tight and seal it under clarified butter or lard, which excludes air and keeps the surface from drying. Potted hare, potted beef, potted char and potted shrimps all belong to the same family, and the technique is documented in English household books from the seventeenth century onward — Cassell's is simply passing on a very old method to a late-Victorian readership that still kept a cool larder rather than a refrigerator. The bladder cover, the huff paste of flour and water, and the pricing in shillings all place this squarely in a kitchen where game arrived whole from an estate or a dealer and had to be dealt with in quantity. What that kitchen did not have was any means of knowing that the airtight seal it prized was also the condition under which the most dangerous foodborne toxin thrives; botulism was not understood until the very end of the nineteenth century, and its link to home-preserved low-acid foods was worked out later still.