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Hare Soup (Proceed as above but instead)
Proceed as above; but, instead of putting the joints of the hare in the soup, pick the meat from the bones, pound it in a mortar, and add it, with the crumb of two French rolls, to the soup.
Rub all through a sieve; heat slowly, but do not let it boil. Send it to table immediately.
TIME.-8 hours.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it turns the preceding brothy hare soup into a thick purée thickened with the pounded meat and bread. The heading is a printer's muddle, and the instruction that matters is the one about not boiling.
- Never let it boilOnce the pounded meat and bread crumb are in, a boil makes the meat fibres seize and go grainy, and the mixture is apt to separate into sediment under greyish liquid. Hold it just below a simmer and send it straight to table.
- "Proceed as above"You need the base hare soup from the entry above this one, in which the jointed hare is long-simmered to make the broth. This page only tells you what to do differently at the end; the ingredients and method of that base are not repeated here.
- The eight hoursThat time covers the whole undertaking, chiefly the long simmer of the base soup, not this finishing step. The purée stage takes perhaps thirty minutes of work.
- French rollsA small, light white bread roll with a thin crust. Use the soft interior of two crusty white dinner rolls or an equivalent piece of a baguette, soaked in a little of the hot soup before it goes in.
- Mortar and sievePounding cooked hare in a mortar and forcing it through a hair sieve is the Victorian route to a smooth purée. A food processor followed by a fine chinois or a food mill gets there faster; do not skip the sieving, because hare is sinewy and the threads are unpleasant.
- Sourcing the hareWild hare is not a supermarket item in most places. A game dealer will supply one; weights vary, but a brown hare commonly runs somewhere in the region of 6 to 10 lb undressed. Two rabbits give a broadly similar quantity of meat but a much milder, paler soup, so expect a different dish.
- Seasonable September to MarchThis reflects the customary British game season, when hare was in practice available. It also flags that the soup was a cold-weather dish, and it is: rich, dark and heavy.
- Seasoning and yieldTaste after sieving and correct with salt and pepper; a spoonful of port or redcurrant jelly suits the dish. One hare should give something in the order of 8 to 10 servings of a soup this thick.
Purée soups made by pounding the cooked meat back into their own broth with bread crumb were standard nineteenth-century practice, and this hare version is a direct descendant of the older British and Scottish hare broths, of which bawd bree is the best-known named example. Bread, not flour or roux, does the thickening here, a technique that runs back through medieval European cookery and survived in game and almond soups long after roux had taken over elsewhere. Hare was a natural candidate: the meat is dark, strong and full of connective tissue that dissolves into a long simmer, which is perhaps why Beeton's book treats the animal as the source of a roast, a jugged dish and a soup in turn. The heading of this entry, which reads "Roast Hare" over a soup instruction, is unexplained on the page itself; it may simply belong to the entry that follows, or be an artefact of transcription.