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One Orange and
One ounce of dried Cherries to dish up with.
Cut as many nice fillets off the hare as you can, lard them and braise them in the stock, vegetables, cloves and bouquet garni, watch them and baste them; when the bacon they are larded with turns a pale brown, the fillets are ready to serve.
While the fillets are cooking, make some quenelle meat (see Quenelles, p. 128) of these ingredients.
The Meat of the Hare that is left after the Fillets are cut.
This is a fragment of a longer entrée — the ingredient list has been cut off mid-line, and the quenelle mixture is cross-referenced to another page — so treat it as a method to work from rather than a complete formula. What survives is a clear picture of how a professional kitchen of the period handled a hare: the prime fillets larded and braised, the trim turned into forcemeat, and dried cherries for the garnish.
- The hinge: do not braise the fillets longHare fillets (the two strips from either side of the saddle) are lean muscle with no connective tissue to break down. The original's cue — stop when the larding bacon has turned pale brown — is really a signal to pull them early; a few minutes per side in the hot stock is enough, and they are best still rosy inside. Braised until "done" in the usual sense they go grey, dry and livery.
- Larding, and what to use insteadLarding means threading strips of pork fat or fat bacon through the meat with a larding needle. If you have no needle, bard instead: wrap the fillets in thin sheets of pork back fat or streaky bacon and tie with string. The fat is not seasoning here, it is the only thing keeping a very lean muscle moist.
- Braising temperatureThe recipe gives no oven direction. On the stovetop keep the stock at a bare simmer; a rolling boil will toughen the fillets before the bacon has coloured at all.
- Bouquet garni and clovesA bouquet garni of the period is thyme, parsley stalks and bay tied with leek or celery, not a paper sachet. Two or three cloves is the outside limit for a pan of game stock — more and the clove takes over the sauce entirely.
- Dried cherriesAn ounce is a scant quarter cup. Sour dried cherries (Morello type) are what is wanted, not sweetened dried sweet cherries; plump them in a little of the braising liquid or in red wine before they go on the dish.
- Quenelle meat from the trimThe quenelle forcemeat is the whole point of jointing the hare yourself: legs, shoulders and scraps are pounded raw with panada and egg, then poached in barely trembling salted water or stock. Modern practice is a food processor, kept cold, and a test quenelle poached first to check seasoning and binding before you shape the rest.
- Sourcing the hareHare is not a supermarket item in most places; order from a game dealer, and ask for it unskinned and hung if you want the flavour the recipe assumes. Farmed rabbit is not a substitute — it is paler, milder and even leaner, and will disappear under the cherries and cloves.
- YieldThe recipe says to cut as many nice fillets as you can, so the count varies with the animal and the butcher's hand; a single hare will stretch to two servings as a plated entree, or four if the quenelles are generous. This is an entree in the old sense -- a made dish between courses -- not a main.
Hare handled two ways in one dish — the prime cuts served whole, the remainder pounded into quenelles — is the logic of the period's professional kitchen, where nothing left the larder unused and the pounded forcemeat was the mark of a trained cook. Quenelles reached English kitchens straight from French practice, and cookery books of this class assume the reader already knows the panada-and-egg proportions from an earlier page, which is why the recipe simply refers back. The dried cherries point east: sour cherries with hare and venison are a long-standing Central European and German pairing, generally traced to the same tradition that gives us redcurrant and rowan jellies alongside game, where sharp fruit cuts the strong, faintly iron taste of dark hare meat. Larding is the other period signature — before reliable oven control and with animals far leaner than today's stock, threading fat through the muscle was the standard insurance against a dry roast or braise, and the larding needle was a piece of everyday equipment rather than a curiosity.