Home › Poultry And Game › Belgian Hare à la Maryland
Belgian Hare à la Maryland
Follow directions for Chicken à la Maryland (see p. 249). Bake forty minutes, basting with bacon fat in place of butter.
Belgian Hare, Sour Cream Sauce Clean and split a hare. Lard back and hind legs, and season with salt and pepper. Cook eight slices carrot cut in small pieces and one-half small onion in two tablespoons bacon fat five minutes. Add one cup Brown Stock, and pour around hare in pan. Bake forty-five minutes, basting often. Add one cup heavy cream and the juice of one lemon. Cook fifteen minutes longer, and baste every five minutes. Remove to serving dish, strain sauce, thicken, season with salt and pepper, and pour around hare.
Two treatments of one animal, written for cooks who already knew the fried-chicken method the first line points at. Both hinge on the fact that rabbit is lean enough to dry out in the time it takes to cook through.
- Belgian Hare is a rabbitDespite the name it is a domestic rabbit breed, not a wild hare — bred long-legged and rangy to look like one. Use a 2½–3 lb whole domestic rabbit; its pale, mild meat is what these directions assume. True wild hare is darker, tougher and stronger, and wants braising rather than 40 minutes in an open pan.
- The Maryland methodThe cross-reference means: cut into serving pieces, season, dip in flour, then beaten egg, then fine crumbs, and bake in a greased pan while basting. Farmer's chicken version is served with a cream sauce; this hare version says nothing about sauce.
- Oven temperatureNeither recipe gives one, because a coal range was judged by hand. Bake at 350°F for the split hare; the crumbed pieces do better at 375°F to keep the coating crisp.
- LardingThreading strips of pork fat or bacon through the back and hind legs with a larding needle is not decoration — it is the only internal fat the animal has. If you have no larding needle, bard instead: tie thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked bacon over the saddle and legs and remove them for the last ten minutes.
- Brown StockFarmer's brown stock is beef shin and bone browned before simmering. A good unsalted beef stock is the nearest thing; salt lightly, since the sauce is reduced and seasoned again at the end.
- "Sour Cream Sauce"The souring is done in the pan — a cup of heavy cream plus the juice of a lemon, which curdles slightly and then smooths out as it reduces. Cultured sour cream added at the start would break over 45 minutes of oven heat, so follow the original order and add the cream late.
- Thickening"Thicken" means a beurre manié or a small flour-and-fat roux stirred into the strained liquid off the boil. About 1 tablespoon each butter and flour will bring a cup of pan liquid to sauce consistency.
- Doneness and timingForty-five minutes plus fifteen is realistic for a 2½ lb split rabbit; check the thickest part of the hind leg for 160°F and clear juices. Larger or older animals need foil and a lower oven rather than more time uncovered.
- YieldOne rabbit of this size serves three, four at a stretch with the sauce and something starchy — the hind legs and saddle are the only substantial portions.
The Belgian Hare is a rabbit breed developed in Belgium and refined in England, and between roughly 1898 and 1901 it was the object of a speculative craze in Britain and the United States — "hare fever" — with breeding stock changing hands for extraordinary sums. The bubble burst, but by then a good deal of rabbit had reached the market, and cookbooks of the period duly acquired a page for it. Fannie Farmer sends the cook to the chicken chapter and changes the fat, then offers a second, more continental treatment with cream and lemon. The larding instruction is the tell that rabbit was still handled as game, whatever the hutch it came from.