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Salt, Lemon-juice, Cayenne
Chop up the bones of the hare, fry them in the butter with the bayleaf, thyme, garlic, and flour ; then add the stock, jelly, claret, the juice and rind of one orange, a few drops of lemon-juice, salt and cayenne. Let this all boil for twenty minutes.
To dish up the hare, turn out the moulds of quenelle meat, and place them in a circle on a dish; lay the fillets on the top with thin slices of orange in between each fillet; boil one ounce of dried cherries for five minutes in a little claret, take them out and place them in the centre of the fillets; strain the sauce and pour it over the hare.
This is the closing half of a longer hare entrée: the printed title is really the tail of an ingredient list, and the instructions assume you already have roasted fillets and moulded quenelles waiting. Read it as a sauce-and-assembly method rather than a complete recipe.
- What is missingThe steps for roasting the hare fillets, and for pounding, sieving and poaching the quenelle forcemeat, presumably stood in the paragraph above this one in the original book. Without them you have a sauce and a plating diagram.
- Stock and jelly"Stock" here means a strong brown game or veal stock; "jelly" is most likely redcurrant jelly, the usual sweet-sharp partner to hare and venison in Victorian kitchens, though in a game sauce it could also mean a meat jelly or glaze. Either way the quantity is small: it acts as a seasoning, not a base.
- ClaretClaret is red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works, but avoid anything oaky or jammy — the sauce already carries orange, cherry and redcurrant.
- The twenty-minute boilTwenty minutes at a steady boil is meant to reduce and concentrate as much as to cook; if it is still thin, keep going rather than adding more flour.
- Orange rindPare the rind in strips with a peeler and take no white pith, or the sauce turns bitter over twenty minutes of boiling. It is strained out at the end in any case.
- Dried cherriesMost likely dried sour cherries, simmered separately so their colour and sharpness stay distinct from the sauce. Five minutes in claret is enough to plump them; modern dried cherries may need less.
- Quenelle mouldsSmall dariole or boat moulds, buttered, with the forcemeat poached in a bain-marie until just set; small enough that the turned-out quenelles will make a ring round a dish.
- Cooking the filletsHare fillet is very lean and turns dry and livery if taken much past pink. Modern practice is to roast or pan-sear the saddle fillets briefly and rest them; period cookery often took them further.
- YieldOne hare, with its bones going into the sauce, makes a modest entrée for a party rather than a main plate — an entrée here is one of several courses.
Hare was a familiar game entrée of the late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner, and this treatment shows the French-trained end of the trade: the animal is broken down, the fillets roasted separately, the trimmings turned into quenelles, and the carcass boiled into its own sauce, so that nothing is wasted and nothing is served on the bone. That is a world away from jugged hare, the older English domestic dish in which the whole animal is stewed slowly with port and its own blood. The sweet-sour combination here — redcurrant jelly, orange, claret, dried sour cherries — is the classic accompaniment to dark game meats across northern Europe, generally traced to the medieval habit of cutting rich, strong-flavoured meat with fruit and vinegar. Cookery of this kind was aimed at cooks in large private households and at the cookery schools that trained them, which is why the instructions assume a kitchen with stockpots, quenelle moulds and a sieve fine enough to pass pounded forcemeat.