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Baked Hare
Select two nice hares, cut them into halves, separating the fore from the hind quarters. Bone the saddles down to the legs, but do not bone the legs; put them in a deep earthenware dish, pour in one wineglassful of white wine and add one fair-sized sliced lemon, one sliced and peeled onion and one sprig of thyme, seasoning with pepper, salt and two or three cloves. Roll the saddles well in the seasoning several times and place one side to steep for twelve or fourteen hours. Take out the pieces, stuff the bone saddles with a rich stuffing, give them a round shape and tie them so as to hold them firmly. Place a piece of fat pork over each saddle, put them in a roastingpan with one carrot and one onion cut into slices and placed at the bottom of the pan, and pour over one pint of broth. Put the pan in a hot oven and bake for forty-five to fifty minutes, taking care to baste frequently with the gravy that comes from them. Take them from the oven, untie, dress on a hot dish, strain the gravy over the saddles, decorate the dish with heart-shaped croutons, and serve. The fore quarters can be used for civets or other dishes.
A classic hotel treatment of hare: the saddles boned, marinated, stuffed and roasted, with the tougher forequarters set aside for a stew. Most of what needs translating here is the vessel, the oven and the meat itself.
- The hinge: do not overcook the saddleHare saddle is very lean and turns dry and livery past medium. Two stuffed saddles in a 425-450F oven may well be done in 30-40 minutes rather than the full fifty; check with a thermometer rather than the clock and rest ten minutes. Note that the stuffing needs to reach a higher temperature than the meat around it. The longer time given here may reflect larger hares or a less predictable range.
- "A hot oven"425-450F. The pint of broth in the pan keeps the bottom from scorching and gives you the basting liquid, so check it partway and top up with water if it threatens to dry out.
- WineglassfulRoughly 2 fluid ounces in period usage, a quarter cup. For two hares' worth of marinade you will want more liquid than that to make contact; the lemon and onion give off juice, but plan on enough wine to keep the meat wet as you turn it.
- Sourcing the hareTrue hare (jackrabbit, or European brown hare) comes from game dealers, usually frozen and often already skinned; it is dark, strong and sinewy. Farmed rabbit is the usual stand-in but is pale, milder and smaller, so scale the roasting time down further. Two hares serve four generously from the saddles alone.
- Steeping for twelve to fourteen hoursDo this in the refrigerator, not on a counter or in an unheated pantry as the original assumes. The deep earthenware dish is simply a non-reactive container; glass or stainless works, and a zip bag uses less wine.
- "A piece of fat pork"Barding fat: fresh pork fatback, sliced thin, tied over the saddle. Unsmoked salt pork, blanched to draw the salt, is the closest supermarket equivalent; thin-cut bacon works but adds smoke the dish was not built around.
- "A rich stuffing"Left undefined, as such recipes commonly were: a forcemeat of ground pork or veal with the hare's liver, breadcrumbs soaked in milk or stock, egg, shallot, thyme and often brandy. Keep it loose enough to be spoonable and cook it through with the roast.
- Croutons and gravyHeart-shaped croutons are white bread cut with a cutter and fried in butter until golden, a standard game garnish. Strain the pan liquid, skim the fat, and reduce it hard before saucing; a pint of broth poured into a roasting pan does not thicken on its own.
- The forequartersA civet is a red-wine game stew traditionally finished with the animal's blood. Freeze the front halves and shoulders for that, or braise them for two hours in wine and stock; they are too tough to roast alongside the saddles.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was written when hare and other wild game were still ordinary restaurant currency in New York, bought from market game dealers. The division of labor in this recipe is the old European one: the saddle, the only genuinely tender cut, is boned, stuffed and roasted for the dining room, while the forequarters go to the stockpot or into a civet -- a name generally traced to cive, the onion or chive that thickened the early forms of the stew, later joined by blood as the binding agent. The long steep in wine with lemon, onion, thyme and cloves is a survival of the older marinade tradition, meant as much to soften and season strong-flavored wild meat as to flavor it. That such a dish sat in a hotel book at all is a reminder of the place game still held in the American restaurant repertoire of the 1890s.