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HARE SOUP (made from the remains of jugged Hare)
Pick out the best of the meat, and divide it into pieces large enough for a mouthful. Put these on a plate, cover them over, and keep them in a cool place till wanted. Put all the rest of the hare, bones, and trimmings, and stuffing, and gravy into a saucepan, pour over it as much good stock (see STOCK MADE FROM BONES) as will cover it, and add eight or nine outer sticks of celery and a slice of stale crumb of bread. Simmer all gently together till the celery is tender. Strain the soup, pick out the bones, and rub the celery and all else that remains patiently through a sieve. The more there is passed through the better. Mix the pulp with the stock, put the soup back into the saucepan, and let it boil up again. If too thin, a little brown thickening may be added, but hare soup should not be too thick. Put the pieces of meat in the soup, add salt and cayenne to taste, and when it is quite hot, without boiling, throw in a glass of port and a little jelly. Add a squeeze of lemon-juice, and serve at once. Time to simmer the bones and trimmings about one hour and a half.
A second-day soup built on the carcass of a jugged hare, so the work is mostly straining and sieving. The instructions are sound; what needs translating is the vocabulary and a few Victorian measures.
- The hinge: no boiling after the portOnce the reserved meat, port and jelly go in, the soup is only brought back to serving heat. Boiling drives off the wine aroma and toughens meat that has already been cooked twice.
- "A glass of port"A wine glass in Victorian cookery books is roughly 2 to 2.5 fl oz, not a modern 6 oz pour. Use about a quarter cup of ruby or tawny port and taste before adding more.
- "A little jelly"Redcurrant jelly, the standard accompaniment to hare and venison. A tablespoon is plenty; its job is to round the acidity of the port and the lemon, not to sweeten the soup.
- "Brown thickening"Browned flour worked with butter, a standard Victorian thickener for brown soups and sauces. A teaspoon of flour worked into an equal weight of butter and whisked in is a workable stand-in. Cassell's is right that the soup should stay on the thin side.
- Outer sticks of celeryThe tough, stringy outside ribs rather than the tender heart. Eight or nine amounts to roughly a head's worth; they are there for flavour and body, since they get sieved into the soup.
- The slice of stale crumbBread is the thickener here, as in a traditional bread-thickened game soup. Crustless white bread, dried out, breaks down completely through the sieve.
- SievingThe instruction to pass through as much as possible is the difference between a thin broth and a proper game soup. A food mill on the medium plate does in two minutes what the original asks you to do patiently with a wooden spoon; finish through a fine sieve if you want it smooth.
- Sourcing hareWild hare is a butcher or game-dealer item in most places and seasonal where it is shot. Rabbit works but gives a paler, milder soup that will want less port.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, only stock enough to cover. In practice one hare's carcass covered with stock makes something in the region of 2 quarts, enough for six as a first course.
Jugged hare — the animal jointed, cooked slowly in a covered jar or deep pot with its blood, port and forcemeat balls — was one of the set pieces of the English game season, and this soup is what a careful nineteenth-century kitchen did with what was left of it the next day. The pattern is typical of Cassell's, which repeatedly follows a large joint or bird with a recipe for its remains; in a household with no refrigeration and a cook accountable for waste, the second dish was not thrift for its own sake but ordinary practice. The flavourings are the fixed vocabulary of English game cookery: port, redcurrant jelly, cayenne and lemon, a combination generally traced to the older habit of dressing strong dark meat with something sweet and something sharp. Note too that the stuffing goes into the pot — the forcemeat from the jug does as much for the soup as the bones do.