Home › H › Hare Soup (INGREDIENTS for quarts of soup)
Hare Soup (INGREDIENTS for quarts of soup)
INGREDIENTS for 3½ quarts of soup. -A hare fresh-killed, 1 lb. of lean gravy beef, a slice of ham, 1 carrot, 2 ontons onions, a faggot of savoury herbs, 1/4 oz. of whole black pepper, r, a little browned flour, 1/4 pint of port wine, the crumb of two French rolls, salt and cayenne to taste, 3 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 6s.
Skin and paunch the hare, saving the liver and as much blood as possible. Cut it in pieces, and put it in a stewpan with all the ingredients, and simmer gently for 6 hours. This soup should be made the day before it is wanted. Strain through a sieve, put the best parts of the hare in the soup and serve.
TIME.-6 hours.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
A game soup built on a whole hare, meant to be made a day ahead and finished with port. The recipe as printed assumes a butcher will hand you the animal in its skin, blood included.
- Sourcing the hare"Fresh-killed" with the blood saved is a butcher's-shop instruction. Order a whole hare from a game dealer and ask for the blood and liver kept separately; hare sold ready-prepared is usually skinned, jointed and bled, in which case the soup will be lighter in colour and body. One hare will serve this quantity.
- Skin and paunchTo paunch is to gut. If the hare comes in the fur, it is skinned and drawn before jointing; both jobs are worth leaving to the dealer.
- Simmering timeSix hours suits an old hare over a coal range. A modern hare is tender in 2 1/2 to 3 hours of bare simmering, and longer only breaks the meat down to threads with nothing left worth returning to the pot.
- Faggot of savoury herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string. Tie the peppercorns in muslin too - a quarter ounce is roughly a tablespoon of whole black pepper, and loose it will make straining tedious.
- Gravy beefLean stewing beef from the shin or leg, cut for long cooking. Shin is the closest thing on a modern counter.
- Browned flour and roll crumbBrowned flour is plain flour toasted dry in a pan until it smells nutty and turns the colour of sand - it thickens less than raw flour but adds colour. The crumb of two French rolls is about two cups of soft white bread, crusts off, which dissolves into the soup and does the real thickening.
- When to add the portBeeton puts everything in at once. A quarter pint of port simmered for hours loses most of its perfume; stirring it in during the last ten minutes, after straining, gives a far better result.
- Making it the day beforeThis is the instruction that matters. Overnight chilling sets a cap of fat that lifts off cleanly, and hare gains considerably in flavour on the second day. Strain, pick the best meat from the bones, chill separately, and reheat together without boiling.
- YieldThree quarts, so eight to ten servings as a first course. The average cost of 6s. is a period note, not a guide.
Hare has often been counted among the mainstays of English game cookery, most famously as jugged hare, in which the joints are stewed in a covered vessel and the sauce finished with the animal's own blood and liver. This soup is the same thinking in liquid form: a strong game stock reinforced with beef and a slice of ham, thickened with bread rather than a roux, and lifted with port - devices commonly met with in Victorian recipes for a dark, rich soup. The note "seasonable from September to March" reflects availability and custom rather than any statutory game season or culinary preference; hare was cheap and plentiful in autumn and winter and had no place on a summer menu. Beeton's insistence on making it the day before is practical household economy as much as gastronomy, since a soup left overnight could be skimmed of fat and reheated for a dinner without tying up the range on the day itself.