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To Make a Hare Pie
760. Take the flesh off the bones in as large pieces as you can; fry it over a slow fire in some butter, two shalots, and a bay leaf, for ten minutes. When it is cold, line the bottom of the pie with forcemeat; season the hare with pepper and salt, lay it in the dish as close as possible, and pour over it the butter in which it was fried; cover it with thin slices of fat bacon. When baked, take off the lid and serve with or without jelly. The forcemeat is made of half a pound of lean beef, the same of suet, with shalots, a handful of bread-crumb, and three eggs to bind it, season well with pepper and salt; if the liver of the hare is good, it will add greatly to the thickness of it.
A plain nineteenth-century game pie: the hare is part-cooked in butter first, packed tight over a beef-and-suet forcemeat, and baked under a pastry lid. The original assumes you know the pastry, the oven and the timing, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: fry to colour, not to cookTen minutes over a slow fire in butter is meant to seal the meat and start the fat rendering, not to cook it through. Hare is very lean and dries to string if it is cooked twice in earnest; take it off while it is still raw at the centre.
- Sourcing the hareA whole hare from a game dealer runs roughly 5-7 lb and yields perhaps 2-2 1/2 lb of usable meat. The instruction to take the flesh off the bones "in as large pieces as you can" implies the whole animal, not only saddle and hind legs. Legs from an older animal can be tough.
- "Shalots"Shallots. Two whole ones for the frying; the recipe gives no quantity for the shallots in the forcemeat.
- The pastry the recipe does not mentionNothing here says what the crust is. The references to a "dish" and to lining "the bottom of the pie" suggest a deep dish lined with pastry and given a lid, though a hot-water crust in a raised mould would also suit; the latter is what makes a pie sliceable cold.
- Oven and timingFor a deep pie holding this much meat, 400F for the first 20 minutes to set the crust, then 325F for a further 1 1/2 to 2 hours. A skewer into the centre should meet no resistance and come out hot.
- Fat baconThe recipe asks for thin slices of fat bacon, which in period meant the fat part of a cured flitch. Streaky bacon sold today is cured and often wet-brined; unsmoked pork back fat or lardo cut in thin sheets is a workable substitute, laid over the meat to baste it as the pie bakes.
- The forcemeatHalf a pound each of lean beef and suet with three eggs makes a firm, close-textured layer rather than a loose stuffing. A handful of breadcrumb is roughly 1 cup fresh. Fry a teaspoon of it and taste before you build the pie; pepper and salt need a heavy hand for something eaten cold.
- The liverThe recipe does not say whether to cook it first. Chopped into the forcemeat with the other ingredients it will bake through with the pie, doing the work the recipe credits it with, adding to the thickness of the mixture.
- Jelly, and servingThe recipe says only "take off the lid and serve with or without jelly", so the jelly accompanies the pie rather than being poured into it; it may mean a set stock reduced from the hare bones or a redcurrant-type jelly of the usual game sort. A pie of this size might serve eight to ten as a cold dish.
Hare was one of the great English pie meats, dark, strongly flavoured and cheap where it was legal to take it, though under the game laws of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that was a narrower circle than one might expect. Recipes of this pattern turn up all through the Georgian and Victorian collections, and the structure barely changes: seal the meat, bed it on a beef-and-suet forcemeat, cover it with fat bacon because the animal has almost none of its own, and seal the whole under pastry. The pastry in a raised pie began life as much as a cooking vessel and a preservative seal as a thing to eat. Adding the liver to the forcemeat is the old economical instinct that nothing from the carcass is wasted, and it is also the step that gives the mixture its characteristic depth.