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HARE SCALLOPS (French)
Cut the fillet or meaty part of the back of a hare into pieces half an inch thick and two inches wide. Put them with two ounces of butter into a stewpan, and fry them until lightly browned. Pour off the butter, and put half a pint of good brown sauce into the pan; thicken it with three table-spoonfuls of the blood of the hare. Simmer gently for twenty minutes. Add a glass of port or Burgundy. Put the scallops into a croustade (see CROUSTADE) on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, and serve. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the hare and wine. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A small French-style saute of hare saddle in a blood-bound sauce, sized for two or three. Almost everything hinges on how the blood is handled.
- The blood must never boilBlood is a protein liaison, like egg yolk: held well below boiling it thickens, but let it approach a boil and it granulates, turning the sauce gritty and grey. Stir it into sauce that is off the boil, and hold the pan at the barest tremble for the twenty minutes. Once broken, the sauce is very hard to bring back.
- Getting the blood at allButchers no longer sell hare blood, and it is not a byproduct you can improvise. A game dealer who hangs whole hares in the fur can reserve it if asked in advance; it is traditionally caught with a spoonful of vinegar stirred in to stop it clotting. Without it the dish is simply hare in brown sauce, which is a different and thinner thing.
- "Scallops" means escalopesNothing to do with shellfish. These are slices from the two fillets of the saddle, the tenderest meat on a hare; the book cuts them half an inch thick and two inches wide. The saddle yields only a modest amount, and the book sizes the dish for two or three.
- Twenty minutes is a long time for filletSaddle meat is lean and cooks in minutes. Modern practice is to brown the slices, lift them out, build and thicken the sauce, then return the meat for the last two or three minutes only. Left in for the full twenty they go dry and grainy.
- Brown sauceA brown roux moistened with rich brown stock and reduced; in a book of this kind that may or may not mean a full espagnole. A concentrated game or veal stock reduced to a light syrup, then thickened, will stand in. Half a pint imperial is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups.
- A glass of wineIn Cassell's this is a wine glass, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz. Added at the end it stays raw-tasting; better to reduce the port or Burgundy separately and add the concentrate, since the sauce cannot be boiled once the blood is in.
- CroustadeA hollowed case of fried bread or baked pastry that holds the meat and sauce. A thick slice of crustless bread, hollowed and fried in clarified butter, is the quickest version; the book cross-refers to its own CROUSTADE entry.
- Pouring off the butterDo it, but scrape the browned fond back into the pan with the sauce. The two ounces of frying butter would make the finished sauce greasy; the caramelised residue is where the flavour is.
- The cost note8d. is eightpence in pre-decimal currency, and pointedly excludes the hare and the wine, which were the expensive parts. It is a note on how cheaply a good sauce could dress an ingredient the household had already shot or been given.
Thickening a game sauce with the animal's own blood is the defining move of the French civet, a family of stews generally traced to medieval practice and still standing behind civet de lièvre and the elaborate lievre a la royale. Blood does two things at once: it binds the sauce without flour and it returns the iron-rich flavour that leaches out of hare during cooking, which is why a hare is traditionally paunched with a bowl held underneath. Cassell's labels the dish "French," where in British kitchens hare more often went into jugged hare or a plain roast, though jugged hare too was finished with blood in careful households.