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HARE SOUP (a richer way)
Cut a hare into neat joints, and put them into a stewpan, with four ounces of butter, half a pound of lean ham, cut small, two sliced carrots, two sliced onions, a sprig each of parsley, marjoram, and thyme, a blade of mace, four or five cloves, a bay-leaf, and four shallots. Fry them for three or four minutes. Pour over them three quarts of good stock, simmer gently for two hours from the time when the soup boils, being careful to clear off the scum as it rises. Strain the soup. Remove the meat from the back of the hare, and put it aside. Pick off all the rest from the bones, and pound it and the ham in a mortar, with two ounces of stale bread-crumbs, which have been soaked in the liquid. Pass the paste through a sieve mix it with half a pint of port, return it to the saucepan, and simmer a quarter of an hour longer. Season with salt and cayenne according to taste, put in the pieces from the back, and, when these are hot, serve immediately. Time, altogether, three hours. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. per quart, exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A Victorian game soup that doubles as a purée: the hare is simmered for stock, then most of its meat is pounded back in as a thickener. The saddle meat is held out and added at the last minute.
- Sourcing the hareWild hare is sold by game dealers in season and occasionally frozen year-round; weights vary, commonly around 5-9 lb, and it should be skinned and jointed for you. Rabbit substitutes at a cost — the flavour is far milder and the colour much paler.
- Quantities in modern termsFour ounces butter is 115 g (1 stick); half a pound of lean ham 225 g; three quarts of stock about 3.4 litres (imperial measure); half a pint of port 285 ml, or a scant 1¼ cups.
- The blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried aril (husk) that sheathes the nutmeg seed. Roughly ¼ teaspoon of ground mace stands in.
- Shallots, not scallionsFour shallots means four whole bulbs, peeled. Modern banana shallots are considerably larger than the small round sort, so two will do.
- The pounding stepA food processor replaces the mortar entirely. Work the cooked hare, the ham and the soaked crumbs to a smooth paste, loosening with a ladle of the strained soup, then push it through a sieve as directed — the sieving catches sinew and shot, and skipping it leaves the soup gritty.
- Do not boil after the port goes inThe final quarter-hour is a bare simmer. A hard boil drives off the port and can make the bread-thickened purée catch and scorch on the base of the pan.
- The saddle meatAdd the reserved back meat only to warm through, two or three minutes. Hare loin is very lean and goes dry and livery if it is allowed to cook again in the soup.
- SkimmingGame bones throw a good deal of grey scum in the first twenty minutes; skim persistently then, as the recipe directs. The recipe does not say what the soup is strained through, and the finished soup is a thickened purée rather than a clear broth.
- YieldThe eight to ten servings in the original are Victorian soup portions. Reckon on six generous bowls as a main course.
Hare soup was one of the fixtures of the English autumn and winter table, and Victorian cookery compendia give several versions because the ingredient was cheap for anyone with access to shooting and dear for anyone who had to buy it — hence the careful note of cost per quart. The method here is essentially the old "soup à la reine" technique applied to game: the flesh is pounded to a paste and returned to its own broth, thickening it with meat and bread rather than flour, a practice that predates the roux-based soups that displaced it. Port with hare and with the closely related jugged hare is a long-standing English pairing, generally explained by the wine's sweetness balancing the strong, faintly bloody flavour of the meat. The soup belongs to a period when a hare arrived at the kitchen door whole and undressed, and a cook was expected to get stock, purée and a garnish of loin out of a single animal.