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Hunter's Hare
Cut the hare in pieces and cook it in the oven in butter, pepper and salt, turning it now and then so that it does not get dry. Then prepare Hunter's Sauce. Melt a bit of butter the size of an egg and add flour, letting it brown, fry in it plenty of chopped onions and shallots, adding tarragon vinegar, cayenne and pepper-corns; spice it highly with nutmeg, three cloves, a sprig of thyme and a couple of bay-leaves. Chop up the hare liver, put it in the sauce and pass all through the sieve. Pour the sauce over the hare and add a good glass of claret, or, for English tastes, of port wine. If the sauce is too thin, thicken it with flour, and serve all together.
A Belgian civet in miniature: the hare is oven-braised in butter, and everything else happens in the sauce. The original assumes you know how long a hare takes and how much liquid a sauce wants, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: the liverThe chopped liver is a thickener as much as a flavouring, and it must cook gently in the sauce before it goes through the sieve. Let it boil hard and it seizes into grey grit that no amount of sieving will smooth out; keep the pan at a bare tremble for a few minutes until the liver is just set through.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a wild hare, around 325F allowing 1½ to 2 hours for an adult animal; a young one may be tender in an hour. The recipe leaves the dish open and asks you to turn it now and then; a covered dish with a little stock will keep it moister.
- "Butter the size of an egg"A common measure in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery books, roughly 2 oz or 4 tablespoons. Take enough flour to make a loose roux with it, and let it go properly brown — this is a brown sauce, and a pale roux gives a thin, raw-tasting result.
- The missing liquidAs written the sauce is butter, flour, onions and vinegar, which will not pour. Assume around a pint of good brown stock, or the pan juices from the hare let down with stock, added after the roux browns.
- Tarragon vinegar and cayenneBoth are given without quantity and both are assertive. A tablespoon or two of vinegar and a small pinch of cayenne will season a pint of sauce; the vinegar can always be topped up at the end, but it cannot be taken out.
- Sieving the aromaticsEverything — onions, shallots, peppercorns, cloves, thyme, bay — goes through the sieve together. Push the vegetables through rather than straining them off; that pulp is the body of the sauce. Fish out the bay leaves and cloves if they resist.
- Claret or portClaret here means red Bordeaux. The port suggestion is the author's concession to British taste and pushes the dish sweet. A "good glass" is imprecise: a cookery-book wineglassful was about 2 fl oz, though 'a good glass' may well mean more. Add it with the stock so it has time to cook out, not at the last moment.
- Sourcing and yieldWild hare comes from a game dealer, and may be sold in the fur or already prepared; ask for the liver (and blood) to be kept. Farmed rabbit is milder and will need less braising and a shorter hand with the cayenne. One hare serves four to six.
This is the standard Continental treatment of hare — brown, sharp and heavily spiced. The "Hunter's Sauce" is a plain relation of the older civet, in which the animal's own liver and blood thicken and darken the gravy; using the offal rather than a separate binding agent is the oldest part of the method and long predates the roux the recipe wraps around it. The aside "or, for English tastes, of port wine" places the book squarely: it was written for an English-speaking audience being introduced to a national kitchen. The recipe assumes you have the liver to hand — that the whole beast came into the household.