Home › Entrées › Three Eggs (One ounce of Butter)
Three Eggs (One ounce of Butter)
One ounce of Butter.
Two ounces of Flour.
One gill of good Stock.
Pepper, Salt, and a little grated Nutmeg.
Make a panada of the flour, butter, stock and seasoning, cook it well and turn it out to cool.
Take one pound of cooked hare, and pound it in a mortar with this panada and two eggs, then rub it through a sieve and stir in two tablespoonfuls of good brown sauce. Grease a mould and fill in with this quenelle meat, leaving a well in the middle, into which put three ounces of the nicest parts of the hare cut into dice, mixed with one gill of good brown sauce, the yolk of an egg, a teaspoonful of chopped mushrooms, a little pepper and salt. Cover over this well when it is filled with more of the quenelle meat, and steam for one hour. Make the sauce of the bones of the hare chopped up, and fried in one ounce of butter with a bayleaf and a little thyme, clove of garlic, onion and carrot. When the flavour is well extracted add three gills of brown sauce, a little lemonjuice, a teaspoonful of red currant jelly, a few grains of cayenne, and one gill of port wine. Boil all well together, and strain over the Chartreuse.
A steamed hare forcemeat moulded around a salpicon of diced hare, finished with a port and redcurrant sauce — a Victorian entrée in the full Escoffier-adjacent manner. The odd title is a cataloguing quirk of the book, which heads recipes with a leading ingredient rather than the dish name; what you are making is a chartreuse of hare.
- The gillIn a British book of this period a gill is about 5 fl oz (142 ml), not the American half-cup. The recipe calls for six in all: one of stock in the panada, one of brown sauce in the salpicon, three of brown sauce in the finishing sauce, and one of port.
- Panada first, and cool it properlyThe hinge of the dish. Cook the flour-and-butter-and-stock paste until it leaves the sides of the pan in a single mass, then spread it thin and chill it cold. A warm or under-cooked panada will not bind, and the quenelle mixture will weep in the mould.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor replaces the mortar; work in short bursts with the meat and panada cold. The sieving is not optional — hare is full of sinew, and pushing the puree through a drum sieve or fine mesh is what gives quenelle meat its texture. Expect to lose some volume in the sieve, so start with a generous pound.
- Brown sauceMeans espagnole: a brown roux-based sauce built on browned bones and mirepoix, reduced. A good reduced veal or game stock thickened lightly will stand in. Do not use bottled brown sauce, which in modern British usage is a spiced vinegar condiment and nothing to do with this.
- Hare, and what to use insteadWild hare is available from game dealers in season but rarely from a supermarket; the legs and shoulders, braised until tender, are the "cooked hare" intended. Rabbit works but is much paler and milder, so lean harder on the port, jelly and reduced stock in the sauce.
- Steaming the mouldButter the mould well and line the base with a disc of parchment. Steam it covered, as the recipe directs; a bain-marie with water halfway up the mould also works. One hour suits a mould of modest size -- test to 160-165F (71-74C) at the centre.
- The well of diced hareFill it cold, and keep the salpicon fairly stiff — a gill of sauce with an egg yolk to bind is meant to set, not to run. Leave a clear half-inch of forcemeat all round so the seam does not split when you turn it out.
- SauceFry the chopped bones hard for real colour, then add the aromatics; the port, lemon juice and jelly go in with the brown sauce and the whole is boiled together, as the recipe directs. Strain through a fine sieve, tasting as you go.
- YieldAbout six as a modern main course, eight to ten in the Victorian sense of an entrée served among several courses. Rest the mould ten minutes before turning out.
A chartreuse in nineteenth-century cookery is a moulded dish built in layers and turned out whole, and the name is generally traced to the Carthusian monks, whose meatless diet is said to lie behind the original vegetable versions; by the time of Carême and his successors the term had drifted a long way from abstinence and come to mean any handsome moulded entrée, game included. This one is pure high-Victorian British kitchen practice as taught in the cookery schools that proliferated after the 1870s: a panada-bound quenelle forcemeat, sieved to smoothness, hiding a salpicon of the best cuts, with a sauce built from the carcass so that nothing of the hare is wasted. Hare was strongly flavoured, and the port-and-redcurrant finish is the standard British answer to it, the same pairing that turns up beside jugged hare and roast venison. The labour involved — pounding, sieving, moulding, steaming, a separate sauce from scratch — assumes a kitchen with staff, which is exactly what "high class cookery" meant to the book's readers.