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Hare
To be put in a pan in the oven: sauce, butter, and a quarter of a pint of cream, pepper, salt and some flour to thicken the sauce. Before the hare is put in the oven, cover it with a thin piece of bacon, which must be taken away before the hare is brought to table.
This is less a recipe than a note jotted from memory: no weight, no oven setting, no time. Everything about the hare itself has to be supplied by the cook, so treat the text as a method for the sauce and the barding, and work out the roast yourself.
- "Sauce" means the pan liquid"Sauce" is ambiguous here -- it may mean the gravy the hare gives up in the pan, or a sauce made separately and put into the pan with the butter and cream. The text does not say. Either way, the butter, cream and flour are worked into whatever liquid is in the pan.
- A quarter of a pint of creamThe book was compiled in England, so this is an imperial pint: 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. If you prefer the US measure it is half a cup, and either works here.
- Thickening without lumpsFlour tipped straight into hot cream will seize. Knead the flour into the butter first, in equal weights, and whisk that paste into the simmering pan liquid in small pieces.
- The barding is not optionalHare is almost fatless and very lean, which is why the bacon or a sheet of pork back fat goes over it. Remove it for the last stretch only if you want colour on the meat, and off entirely before serving as instructed.
- Age decides the cookingA young hare can be roasted whole in something like 1 1/2 to 2 hours, while an older animal tends to stay tough when roasted and is usually jointed and braised for considerably longer, until the leg meat pulls from the bone.
- Buying it nowHare is a game dealer's item, sold whole and often with the head on, sometimes still in its skin. Ask for it paunched and skinned. Rabbit is not a substitute for the flavour, though it will take the same treatment in less time.
- YieldA whole hare of 5 to 6 lb serves four generously, with mashed potato or the Belgian standby of stewed apple or red cabbage to cut the richness.
The Belgian Cook Book was put together by Mrs Brian Luck in 1915 from dishes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion. The terseness of entries like this one probably reflects the circumstances in which they were collected -- recipes recalled without notes or scales -- though the book does not describe how they were taken down. Hare belongs squarely to Flemish and Walloon country cooking, where it turns up most famously as hazenpeper or civet de li e stewed long with onions, vinegar or beer and often prunes, thickened at the end with the blood. This version is the plainer roast. Barding lean game with a sheet of bacon or pork fat, then stripping it off before the dish reached the table, was long-standing practice in European kitchens, the fat being treated as a cooking aid rather than part of the meal.