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Leveret, Cold Roast, with Poivrade Sauce
Divide the remains of a roast leveret into neat pieces, trim them, and put them aside until wanted. Cut an ounce of lean uncooked ham into dice, and take the same quantities of minced onion, carrot, and celery. Put these ingredients into a stewpan with an ounce of butter, and fry them until they are lightly browned. Pour over them three table-spoonfuls of vinegar, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and about a tea-spoonful of anchovy sauce; add half a blade of mace, a tea-spoonful of salt, a salt-spoonful of cayenne, and a bayleaf. Simmer gently for half an hour, then add half a pint of good brown sauce and a glass of white wine. Boil gently, and skim carefully until all the fat has been removed, then strain the sauce, put it back into the stewpan, and let it boil for a few minutes. Put in the pieces of cold leveret, and serve when they are quite hot. The sauce must not boil after the leveret is added. Time, an hour and a half. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 10d. Sufficient for four or six persons.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast game: a sharp, vinegar-and-wine poivrade built on a mirepoix and finished with brown sauce, then used to reheat the sliced meat. Everything hangs on the last line of the recipe.
- The hingeOnce the leveret goes in, the sauce must stay below a simmer. Already-cooked game reheated at a boil turns dry and stringy in a couple of minutes; hold the pan at 160-170F and give the pieces five to eight minutes to come through.
- LeveretA leveret is a hare under a year old, and hare is not a supermarket item in most places. Cold roast rabbit works, as does any leftover roast game bird or venison; the sauce is robust enough not to care.
- MeasuresA salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon. Half a pint of brown sauce is 10 fl oz in British measure, roughly 1 1/4 cups. "A glass of white wine" is imprecise in books of this date and generally means 2 to 4 fl oz; start at 2 and taste.
- Brown sauceThis means espagnole or a well-reduced brown gravy from bones, not the bottled condiment sold as brown sauce today. A good reduced veal or game stock thickened lightly with a brown roux gives the intended body.
- Mushroom ketchup and anchovy sauceMushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold by some British makers; a teaspoon of soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquor stands in. Anchovy sauce can be replaced by half a teaspoon of anchovy paste or two mashed fillets.
- MaceHalf a blade is half a strip of the lacy husk of nutmeg, not ground mace. If using ground, a scant pinch is plenty, and add it with the vinegar so it has time to soften.
- TimingThe stated hour and a half appears to cover trimming, the half-hour simmer of the aromatics, the skimming, and the reheating; much of that time is unattended.
- Skimming and strainingThe instruction to skim until all fat is gone is worth following, since roast game fat rising into a vinegar sauce reads as greasy. Chilling the strained sauce briefly makes the fat easy to lift.
- YieldFour to six as written, which assumes the sauce is doing much of the work; expect small portions unless you have a generous amount of cold meat.
Poivrade is the classic French pepper sauce for game, built on vinegar, a browned mirepoix and a brown base, and it appears in Escoffier's repertoire as the parent of sauce chevreuil and sauce venaison. Recipes of this type are often filed under "rechauffes" or warmed-up dishes, a genre of nineteenth-century cookery devoted to using up cold meat. The costing in pence, given exclusive of the wine, is a reminder that books of this kind served as budgeting tools for the household as well as instructions for the cook.