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HARE, SAUCE FOR (another way)
Fry a sliced carrot and a sliced onion in a little butter until lightly browned. Pour over them half a pint of brown sauce, nicely seasoned, add a blade of mace, a little salt and pepper, if necessary, and a quarter of a pint of stock, and simmer gently for half an hour. Strain the gravy, stir into it two table-spoonfuls of red currant jelly and a table-spoonful of vinegar, and serve in a tureen. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward brown sauce sharpened with red currant jelly and vinegar, of the sort served with roast or jugged hare. The measurements are imperial and the base sauce is assumed rather than given.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint here is the British 20 oz pint, so 10 fl oz — about 1¼ cups. The quarter pint of stock is 5 fl oz, the old "gill", roughly ⅔ cup.
- Brown sauceThis means a made brown sauce: brown roux and brown stock, simmered and skimmed, not the bottled condiment sold under that name in Britain today. A good reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly will stand in.
- Blade of maceOne dried strip of the aril from a nutmeg, not ground mace. About a quarter teaspoon of ground mace approximates it, but add it late and taste, as the ground spice is more assertive.
- The hingeStir the jelly and vinegar in after straining, off the boil. Boiling the sauce once the jelly is in dulls the fruit and can make it cloying; the acid and sweetness are meant to stay bright against the game.
- VinegarA tablespoon is a lot in 15 fl oz of sauce. Use a wine or cider vinegar rather than harsh malt, and add half, taste, then finish.
- SkimmingHalf an hour's gentle simmer with the vegetables will throw fat and scum to the surface. Skim before straining or the finished sauce will taste greasy and look dull.
- Yield"Five or six persons" is plausible for a sauce served in a tureen alongside a roast: the finished quantity works out at roughly 2 to 3 fl oz a head.
Sweet-sour accompaniments to hare and venison go back a long way in English cookery, where the strong, dark, dry flesh of game was habitually met with something fruity and something acid — verjuice, wine and dried fruit in earlier centuries, red currant jelly by the eighteenth and nineteenth. Cassell's gives several versions of hare sauce. The recipe also assumes that brown sauce is already to hand, which is why the instructions begin mid-stream with "half a pint of brown sauce" and no hint of how to make it. Red currant jelly with game remains the surviving fragment of this tradition on British tables.