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Salt, Whole Pepper, Cayenne
Two pints Second Stock.
Cut up the hare in joints after it has been skinned and paunched. Do not wash it. Cut the bacon up in small pieces and butter a saucepan with the butter. Put the bacon and the hare in the stewpan and fry a light brown; then add the onion, &c., also the wine; boil ten minutes, add the stock, and let this simmer gently for about one hour and a half; strain through a sieve, remove all the meat from the bones, and pound in a mortar; pass the meat through a fine hair-sieve, using the liquor by degrees to pass it through with. Make it hot in a stewpan, but do not let it boil. Add seasoning if required.
Potage aux Queues de Bœuf.
Ingredients.
This is a puréed hare soup, printed here without its ingredient list — the page picks up mid-book, so the quantities of hare, bacon, butter, onion and wine are missing and only the two pints of second stock survive. The last line, Potage aux Queues de Bœuf, is the heading of the next recipe (oxtail soup) and has nothing to do with this one.
- The hinge: never let it boil at the endOnce the pounded meat has been passed back into the liquor the soup is a purée thickened with protein, and boiling will make it grainy and cause it to separate. Bring it only to a bare steam before serving.
- Second stockThe weaker second extraction drawn from bones already used once for first stock. A light unsalted brown stock, or stock diluted by about a third with water, stands in for it; the hare itself supplies most of the flavour.
- Paunched, and "do not wash it"Paunched means gutted. The instruction not to wash the hare is usually read as a way of keeping the blood with the carcass, which would darken and enrich the soup. Wipe with a cloth rather than rinsing.
- Quantities to work fromNone survive on this page, so what follows is an editorial reconstruction: for two pints of stock, reckon on the forequarters and ribs of one hare (roughly 2 lb of bony meat), 2–3 oz of streaky bacon, 1 oz butter, one onion, and a glass of red wine — about 5 fl oz. What the book's "&c." covered is not stated, though the salt, whole pepper and cayenne of the title presumably belong to it.
- Pounding and the hair sieveA mortar and a fine horsehair sieve did the work now done by a food processor and a fine chinois or drum sieve. Blend the picked meat with a little of the hot liquor, then push it through the sieve; the sinew and stray bone fragments left behind are the point of the exercise.
- Ten minutes' boiling of the wineThis is deliberate reduction, not an oversight. It drives off raw alcohol before the stock goes in, so the finished soup tastes of fruit rather than spirit.
- TimingAn hour and a half is right for hare, which is dense and much tougher than rabbit. The meat should pull from the bone easily before you strain.
- CayenneNamed in the title, so it belongs in the seasoning "if required" at the end. A very small pinch — enough to sharpen the gamey sweetness without reading as heat.
- YieldTwo pints of stock, once thickened with the meat purée, gives four to six servings as a first course. Croutons, or a little port or redcurrant jelly, are sometimes served with hare soup, though this recipe mentions none of them.
Hare soup, or potage de lièvre, was a fixture of the British and Anglo-French repertoire from the eighteenth century onward, and belongs to a family of "purée" soups in which the meat is cooked, pounded and sieved back into its own broth rather than left in pieces. The technique is laborious by design, producing a smooth, dark, spoon-coating soup with no fibre in it, and it turns up in books pitched at high-class cookery and at the professional or ambitious private cook. The insistence on not washing the hare reflects a period preference, still held by game cooks, for keeping the blood — hare is traditionally hung unpaunched so that the blood collects in the body cavity, to be caught when it is later paunched, and it is that blood, along with the bacon, that separates this soup from an ordinary brown broth. The related and better-known dish is jugged hare, which uses the same principles of blood, bacon and long slow cooking with wine.