Home › The Principles of Cookery › Hare, Sauce For
Hare, Sauce For
Crumble three ounces of bread as if for bread sauce. Let it soak in port wine, and, when quite soft, beat it over the fire with an ounce of butter, a table-spoonful of red currant jelly, a little salt, and a table-spoonful of chilli vinegar. Serve as hot as possible. Time, a few minutes after the bread is soaked. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A port-and-crumb sauce in the old style, closer to a thick bread sauce than to a gravy. It comes together in minutes once the bread has softened, and the whole point is heat at the table.
- The bread"Crumble as if for bread sauce" means stale white crumb, crusts removed, rubbed fine rather than blitzed to paste. Three ounces is roughly 1 1/2 cups of loose fresh crumbs.
- The port is unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity, only "let it soak" until quite soft. Add it gradually — enough to saturate the crumbs without leaving a pool, somewhere around 1/2 to 3/4 cup for 3 oz of bread, depending on how dry the loaf is.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies for a week or two. Any sharp red or cider vinegar with a pinch of cayenne stands in for a tablespoonful.
- Beat it over the fireLow heat and constant work with a wooden spoon. The mixture is mostly starch and will catch and scorch on a hot burner, which gives the finished sauce a bitter edge no jelly will cover.
- Red currant jellyNot a garnish but the sweet-tart balance against the port and vinegar. Use a real currant jelly rather than a set jam; the seeds and pulp coarsen the texture.
- Serve as hot as possibleThe instruction is emphatic because the sauce stiffens badly as it cools. Hold it over hot water and loosen with a spoonful more port or a little stock if it tightens before it reaches the table.
- Yield and useFour to five servings, intended for roast or jugged hare. It suits venison, wild duck and other strong dark game equally well. The "probable cost, 4d." is a period price, and the recipe explicitly excludes the wine from that figure.
Sweet-sour sauces built on wine, fruit jelly and spiced crumbs are the long tail of medieval English cookery, where sugar, vinegar and bread as a thickener were normal companions to meat; by the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the style survived mainly in the game course, where it was thought to answer the strong, slightly musky flavour of hare. Currant jelly with hare and venison was already so fixed a pairing that many Victorian books treat the jelly alone as sufficient sauce. Chilli vinegar, which appears here as the sharpening note, belonged to a whole family of flavoured vinegars — tarragon, garlic, cucumber, horseradish — that a well-run household kept bottled on the shelf and whose decline is often attributed to the rise of commercial bottled sauces. The dish also shows how bread earned its keep: the same crumbs that thickened this sauce made bread sauce for poultry, and stale loaf was too valuable to waste.