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Leveret Puree
Take the remains of cold roast or braised leveret. Cut the meat off the bones, remove the skin and sinews, chop it small, and pound it in a mortar. Add gradually, whilst pounding, the remains of the sauce, and press all together through a hair sieve. Like other purees, this may be used for garnishing patties, or it may be made hot with a little reduced stock and seasoning, and served with mashed potatoes. Time, about an hour to prepare.
A leftovers recipe from the era before refrigeration, when a roast had to be used up within a day or two. The whole thing depends on having good roast hare and its sauce already in hand.
- What a leveret isA leveret is a hare under a year old, smaller and more tender than a full-grown hare and much darker and gamier than rabbit. Hare is sold by game dealers and some online butchers; if you substitute rabbit the puree will be pale and mild, and you will want more seasoning and a spoonful of the pan juices to compensate.
- The mortar, updatedThe pounding is simply mechanical reduction to a paste. A food processor does it in under a minute, though pulse rather than run it continuously or the meat turns pasty and gluey. Much of the hour the recipe allows would have gone on the pounding and the sieving.
- A hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, of the kind standard in Victorian kitchens before cheap fine wire mesh. A nylon drum sieve (tamis) or a fine stainless strainer with a plastic bowl scraper does the same job. The recipe treats the step as essential, and it catches whatever sinew the pounding leaves behind.
- "The remains of the sauce"Whatever gravy or braising liquid came with the original roast. If none survives, use a strongly reduced game or brown stock, a few spoonfuls at a time, until the paste just holds its shape on a spoon. Add it slowly; a puree that goes slack cannot be brought back.
- ReheatingWarm it gently in a saucepan over low heat with the reduced stock, stirring. Cooked game reheated hard becomes dry and grainy. Bring it through to steaming hot all the way through, then stop.
- SeasoningCold game tastes flat. Salt, black pepper and a little mace or a few drops of port or redcurrant jelly are period-appropriate and will wake it up. Taste after it is hot, not before.
Cassell's belongs to the Victorian school of cookery in which nothing left the kitchen unused, and the puree was a standard way of turning the second day of a roast into something that looked deliberate. Hare and leveret were common on English tables through the nineteenth century, and Cassell's carries a number of hare entries -- jugged, roasted, potted, in soup -- of which this is the tail end. The instruction to pound and sieve reflects French kitchen practice as it was absorbed into English domestic cooking during the century: the smooth, sieved puree was a marker of a properly trained cook, and the same paste would serve as forcemeat, patty filling or the base of a game soup. The hour allowed for the work is a reminder of how much of a Victorian kitchen's labour went into texture alone.