Hare
Roast Hare. - To be stuffed with Forcemeat No. 6; to be barded; and to be roasted on a spit for fortyfive minutes before a brisk fire; and during the roasting to be frequently basted with butter or dripping. Five minutes before the hare is to be removed from the fire, take off the bards, sprinkle it with salt and flour, and baste it with fresh butter. When this froths up and the hare is brown, dish it with brown gravy underneath and currant jelly in a boat. The ears are considered a delicacy, and care should be taken not to burn them. They should be scalded and freed from hair before the roasting begins. Jugged Hare. Old receipt. Cut the hare into pieces, season it high, and put it in a stone jar or jug with half a pound of ham or bacon (fat and lean cut up together), six shalots, two onions, and some thyme, parsley, savory, marjoram, lemon-peel, mace, cloves and nutmeg-all well mixed with the meat. Pour over it a tumblerful of red wine, another of broth, and the juice of a Seville orange. Tie the mouth of the jar tight with bladder or leather and brown paper, and place it in a pan of boiling water deep enough to heat it well, but not to have a chance of boiling over and into the jar. In this situation the jug or jar is to remain three or four hours, the water boiling all the time and more added as it boils away. Then take out the hare, strain the liquor, skim off the fat, and add a thickening of roux. If in the meantime the hare should cool, put it back into the jug with the thickened gravy, and set it in the pot of boiling water till it gets hot, but by no means suffer it to boil. Serve it hot with slices of lemon and with currant jelly.
Civet of Hare is practically the same thing-only it is not done in a closed jug. More liquor may therefore be used, both of wine and of broth, to make up for evaporation; and the name of the dish is to be justified by serving up with it not indeed chives-which have very insignifi- Hare cant bulbs-but other small onions in great abundance. The pieces of hare are to be fried in butter for ten minutes before being set to stew; and so also the small onions are to be browned in butter before being simmered with the stew.
Hare Soup. The Scotch way-with blood: after Meg Dods. "Skin and clean the hare thoroughly, saving the blood. Cut a dozen or more of very small chops from the back, shoulders, and rump. Put what remains of the hare and the bones into a pot, with four pounds of fresh shin or neck of beef, four quarts of water, a couple of turnips, two carrots, six middle-sized onions, a half-ounce of black and Jamaica peppercorns, an ounce of salt, a faggot of sweetherbs, and a large head of celery. Boil for three hours, and strain. Brown the small chops nicely in a sautépan, add them to the strained stock, and simmer for an hour and a half. Strain the blood; rub it with flour, rice-flour, or arrowroot, and a half-pint of the soup, as if making starch; add more hot soup, and put the whole into the soup, which must be kept only at the point of boiling for ten minutes, lest the blood curdle. The soup may be further thickened with the parboiled liver, pounded in a mortar with the pieces of hare boiled for stock. When enough done, skim, put in a glass of catsup, and one or more of red wine, what more salt, pepper, and cayenne is required, and also essence of celery. Serve with the haresteaks in the tureen. "Observations. Red wine, in the proportion of a quarter-pint to a tureen of soup, is reckoned an improvement by some gourmands; and those of the old school still like a large spoonful of currant jelly dissolved in the soup."
Hare Soup. The English way-without blood: after Miss Acton. "Cut down a hare into joints, and put into a soup-pot or large stewpan, with about a pound of lean ham Haricot in thick slices, three moderate-sized mild onions, three blades of mace, a faggot of thyme, sweet marjoram, and parsley, and about three quarts of good beef stock. Let it stew very gently for full two hours from the time of its first beginning to boil, and more if the hare be old. Strain the soup, and pound together very fine the slices of ham and all the flesh of the back, legs, and shoulders of the hare, and put this meat into a stewpan with the liquor in which it was boiled, the crumb of two French rolls, and half a pint of port wine. Set it on the stove to simmer twenty minutes; then rub it through a sieve, place it again on the stove till very hot, but do not let it boil; season it with salt and cayenne, and send it to table directly."
HARICOT is a word which in French means two different things-a savoury stew and a kidney-bean. The French etymologists are much exercised to explain how it can mean either of these things, and they are at their wit's end to explain how it can mean both. The explanation is really very simple and lies on the surface; but the French have an old reputation for loving far-fetched etymologies, and they would be untrue to themselves if they did not lose themselves in endless subtleties to unravel the mystery of the haricot. In the seventeenth century Ménage proved clearly that the word might come from the Latin name for a bean-faba, which might beget fabarius, which might beget fabaricotus, which might beget faricotus, which might beget haricotus. Unhappily there was no authority whatever for the intermediate links of the genealogical chain leading from faba to haricot. And, still worse, the name of haricot as a stew was in existence for 300 years before any one thought of giving the same name to the bean. In presence of this fact the French philologers of our day have been driven to a new explanation. It has been invented by M. Génin, and it has Haricot been accepted by the leading French authority, M. Littré, as well as by the German authorities, Scheler and Diez. The oldest mention of the word is to be found in a cookery book which is supposed to bear the date of 1393- Le Ménagier de Paris. There is a receipt there given for "hericot de mouton," the first sentence of which says that the mutton must be cut into pieces. M. Génin has seized upon this sentence and has connected it with a very old French word-haligote or herligote, which he derives from the Latin aliquot! Whatever its derivation, its meaning was a piece or morsel, and it had a corresponding verb harigoter, to cut to pieces. That, said M. Génin, is haricot-it means anything cut to pieces. And this word, he continues, came to be applied from the stew to the kidney-bean, because, no doubt, some one saw a dish of kidney-beans cut to pieces and thought it resembled a mutton hash! One cannot always account for the play of fancy. A crust of bread is rubbed with garlic; it is thrown into a chicory salad to give it a flavour; and all the world (at least in French) agree to call it, for some unknown reason-a capon. And so, no doubt, for some inexplicable reason a dish of kidney-beans was called after a mutton stew--a haricot.
It is almost incredible that men of learning and sense, who call each other spirituel in quoting this explanation, should allow themselves to be deceived by such follies. It is all the more wonderful inasmuch as they cannot touch upon the question without using words which on the very surface contain the real explanation. They have always to begin by pointing out that a haricot of mutton is nothing more nor less than a ragoût of mutton; and yet it never seems to have occurred to them that haricot is radically the same word as ragoût. In England, however, we are familiar with the fact that the French do not recognise their own words when returned to them from abroad.
Ages ago the English took the French word bœuf and Haricot turned it into beef. When the name of roast beef came to France the French did not recognise their own word, and for two hundred years they have been speaking of rosbif d'agneau and rosbif de mouton. It is not merely the ignorant who fall into such a locution : men of education, with a fine ear for the delicacies of language, such as Jules Janin, will adopt the blunder with childish simplicity. Now this is what has happened to them in a blunder of lower depth with regard to their word ragoût. It came back to them altered from the German frontier, and they altogether failed to recognise it. It came back to them pronounced as ricot. The vowel changes can easily be explained, and will scarcely be surprising to us who have transmuted bœuf into beef. The only change of consonant, the hardening of ginto c, is characteristic of the pronunciation of French on the Rhine. So far there is no difficulty. The difficulty arises when we have to account for the initial syllable of haricot. It has been shown by Mr. Max Müller that there are many words aspirated in French purely through the contagious influence of the German pronunciation. Thus the Latin word altus ought to be in modern French aut: it is haut through contagion of the German hoch. Again the Latin ululare ought to be in French urler, or as in old French uller: it was huller and it is hurler through contagion of the German heulen. But more than this: the word we are considering begins with r, to which the Germans gave such a strong guttural pronunciation that it might be represented in writing as hricot: and the French caught this up as haricot or hericot. There is a case in point. The French have adopted the German word rang and have caught it up quite correctly. But they have also caught it up wrongly. The guttural pronunciation of the German r made the word sound like hrang, and they caught it up as harangue. So rang and harangue, which are at root one and the same word, exist in modern Haricot 24 I French as two distinct words, all through the guttural r of the Germans, which seemed to make an additional syllable of itself. And this is precisely what has happened to ragoût. It went over to Germany and came back in German pronunciation haricot or hericot, which was all the more easily accepted as in Provence there was a word fricot, which is still in use, which means, like haricot, a savoury stew, and which seemed to give it a sort of fraternal right.
So much for the stew as regards its name; and for more of a practical nature turn to Ragoût and Navarin. We have now to account for the name of the bean.
And here the French have gone astray through a false notion that the word is still the same. Haricot, the bean, is a distinct word which has nothing whatever to do with a ragoût. It means a snail. There has been a peculiar tendency to designate this kind of bean in a simile. The ancients called it Phaseolus a little boat, and Linnæus has fixed this for the name of the tribe. We in England call it a kidney-bean; and the Portuguese called one of its varieties a caracol or snail, the Italians a caraco or caracolla. This is the word which the French have transfigured into haricot and have allotted to the species. They turned the I at the end into t, just as they made apricoque into abricot and l'oriole into loriot. That the initial should be transmuted into a simple aspirate is quite in accordance with the possibilities of a language which has chat for cat, and of a word which in one form (said to be Arabic) appears as garagol.
Compare garb (a sheaf) with harvest. To one particular variety of the kidney-bean Linnæus gave the name of Phaseolus Caracalla, and the French recognise it as haricot limaçon, which is a reduplication of the original name, the meaning of which has been lost. Such reduplications are common enough. Thus in English we speak of a cockleshell-forgetful of the fact that cockle (coquille) is itself a Haricot shell. Or again we speak of a dog-kennel, forgetful of the fact that kennel (canile) is itself a dog-house, and that therefore to say dog-kennel is in effect to say dog-doghouse. Unhappily, in England, the haricot is little known except in the unripe pod. It is the only vegetable which we eat in the pod, and the technical name for it in this condition is green haricots, or in French haricots verts. It would be more convenient, however, to speak of them as haricot pods, to distinguish them from the haricot seeds which are also green, as peas or beans are, and not merely white and red. In England the only kinds of haricot that come to perfection are the dwarf kidney-bean, known as the French bean, a native of India introduced into England three centuries ago; and the scarlet-runner, a native of South America, introduced in 1663, but so little regarded as an article of food that up to the end of last century it was chiefly used as an ornamental flower, or petted as a curiosity among twining plants because it is the only one which twines the opposite way of the sun. But neither of these is brought to such perfection in England that the seeds are cared for, and the seeds used here are mostly imported from France. Of these there are three chief kinds, which may be rudely described as four-the Green, the White, the Red, and the broad haricot of Soissons. It must be clearly understood, however, that the first two are the same and differ only as green peas from yellow. 1. Haricot Pods-what the French call haricots verts; called also French beans, and, in old French, Roman beans.
Plain boiled. This is called the English fashion. Pick and clear of strings about a pound of them, cut them in pieces lengthways, and boil them in an uncovered stewpan with salt and much water till they are tender. Drain Haricot them well in a colander, and when serving them put a good piece of butter among them.
Tossed. Boil as before, and having drained them thoroughly, toss them with two ounces of butter for nearly ten minutes on a brisk fire. Add a pinch of salt, a squeeze of lemon, and a sprinkling of parsley chopped fine.
En Poulette. Boil and drain them as before, and serve them in a Poulette sauce without the mushrooms, but with a sprinkling of chopped parsley.
In Salad. Cut them in diamond shapes, blanch them well, cook them, cool them, drain them, mix them with oil and vinegar, and with a garnish of chopped ravigote. To this salad may be added, in the Lyonnese fashion, slices of onion baked in cinders, or indeed baked any way. 2. Haricot Beans. These are the seeds; first, the flageolets, which are green and are to be had fresh from July to October, or dried always; second, the white haricots, which are the green ones ripened; third, the red haricots; fourth, the large Soissons beans.
Plain boiled. If the beans are fresh they are thrown into boiling water; if dry into cold. It was once the custom to soak the latter for a long time-perhaps twentyfour hours-in cold water before use; but this was irksome, for it implied that we could not have haricots without a four hours-in cold water before use ; but this was irksome, day's notice beforehand. It has since been found that by a particular process of boiling the previous soaking can be dispensed with. The art is this, and it applies to dried a particular process of boiling the previous soaking can be peas as well: Put the beans into cold water, bring them to the boiling point and simmer them for half an hour; then put in a gill of cold water, bring the beans to the boil- to the boiling point and simmer them for half an hour; then ing point again and simmer as before; every half-hour repeat the cold water, the boiling and the simmering, till the beans are tender. Salt is taken for granted, it is repeat the cold water, the boiling and the simmering, needless to say.
Harlequin Comfits Tossed in Butter. Toss them in two ounces of butter, a wineglassful of the liquor they have boiled in, salt and chopped parsley. Sometimes when tossed in this way, chopped parsley. Sometimes when tossed in this way, these haricots are mixed with haricot pods-which are then called haricots panachés.
À la Bretonne. Mixed half and half with Breton Sauce and served with roast or broiled mutton. See Breton. Purée of White Haricots for Garnish. Boil them with an onion and a faggot of parsley, which latter is afterwards to be put aside, and then pass the haricots and the onion through a sieve, moistening with milk or broth to help them through. Warm them up with butter, salt and a little sifted sugar, and keep them warm in the bain marie till the moment of serving, when they may be brightened up with another piece of fresh butter. For a slightly different treatment, see the article Purée.
Stew of Red Haricots. Let them be plain boiled, but not for nearly the full time. Then put them into a stewpan with about half a pound of streaky bacon in small slices, a pinch or two or flour, the same of pepper, two glasses of red wine, two glasses of the water they have boiled in, and simmer them for from twenty to thirty minutes. When all is ready add an ounce of butter and serve. This is the French idea of beans and bacon.
Haricot Soups, white and red, are prepared like pea The red haricot soup soup, for which see the receipt. goes always by the name of Condé, the white by that of Clermont.