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Civet of Hare
Skin and clean a hare, using care to save all the blood; chop off the hind legs, and cut them up into two or three pieces; also divide the body into equal parts. Cut one-half pound of bacon into small pieces about one inch in thickness, and blanch in boiling water. Remove, drain and fry in a stewpan with a little butter until quite brown; take them from the pan, throw in the pieces of hare and cook until they are quite firm. Lift them out, and mix in a little flour to thicken the gravy; then add one quart of broth, and one pint of red wine. Put the pieces of hare back again, also the bacon, and add a bunch of parsley, a few species, onions, pepper and salt to taste, and a little trimmings of mushrooms. Put the pan on the fire again and boil for an hour. Skim off the fat and place the pieces of hare and bacon (one at a time) in a clean saucepan. Skim the sauce again, put it on the fire and reduce until it is quite thick and will stick to the hare after having been passed through a fine sieve. Put a few onions fried in butter to a light brown in a saucepan with a little broth, and stew them; add a few mushrooms also fried in butter, and the blood and liver to thicken. Warm up and let it remain on the side of the fire, taking care not to boil it, or the blood will be likely to curdle, when the sauce would not be dark enough in color. Place the pieces of meat on a dish, and serve with onion broth poured over the hare. Civet of Hare, Bourgeoise Clean a hare and cut into small pieces, saving the blood. Put two ounces of butter and two tablespoonfuls of flour into a stewpan, and stir them over the fire until well mixed; then put in the pieces of hare, with a few slices of fat bacon, a bunch of sweet herbs, some mushrooms and artichoke bottoms, a few small onions fried in butter and pepper and salt, moistening with one-half pint of white wine and enough stock to cover. Stew the hare until tender, and then put the pieces on a dish. Skim the sauce, remove the bunch of herbs, add the crushed liver of the hare, also the blood, and boil again. Pour the sauce over the hare, and serve.
Civet of Hare, French Style Skin a good-sized hare, draw it, and preserve the blood should there be any, and also the liver, with the gall carefully removed. Place the blood and the liver on the same dish, and cut the hare into a dozen pieces; put these into a stone jar, seasoning with salt, pepper and nutmeg, adding also one sliced onion, one sprig of thyme, two bay leaves and half a wineglassful of white wine; stir all together well, and steep for six hours. Remove the pieces of hare, put them in a saucepan with one ounce of butter, adding twelve glazed small onions, and one ounce of salted pork cut into small pieces, and cook on a sharp fire for ten minutes; then add three tablespoonfuls of flour; stir thoroughly and moisten with one wineglassful of red wine and one pint of white broth, and stir until it boils, seasoning again with pepper and salt. Cook for one hour longer, and fifteen minutes before it is done put in the blood, also the heart and liver, both finely chopped and mixed together. Serve with croutons of fried bread for a garnish.
Fried Fillets of Hare with Quenelles Take two fillets of hare, trim, cut them slantwise across into five pieces each, moisten and beat a little, then sprinkle them over with salt and pepper. Pour a little melted butter into a flat stewpan, and put in the fillets, arranging them side by side. Prepare a little game gravy with the bones and remaining parts of the hare, adding a small quantity of thickened brown sauce. Prepare a forcemeat with the trimmings of the fillets, shape them into quenelles with a small spoon, and poach them in salted water. Place the pan with the fillets on the fire and fry briskly, turning them in order to cook both sides. Take out and drain; pour on four tablespoonfuls of sauce, put them on a dish and pour the remainder of the sauce over. Place the quenelles around the dish, and serve.
Larded Fillets of Hare, Minute Style Skin and clean a hare, cut off the fillets, lard and put them into a basin, season with ground mixed spice, pour over enough oil to moisten, and let them soak for one hour. In the meantime pour some stock in a saucepan, and reduce it nearly to a glaze; then add a slice of fat bacon and the larded fillets, cover with a piece of buttered paper, and simmer for twelve minutes, by which time the fillets should be well cooked and browned. Great care should be taken not to let the fillets burn. Put them onto a dish, add a little rich stock to the glaze, stir well, pour it over, and serve.
Fillets of Hare with Poivrade Sauce Clean two hares, cut off the fillets, remove the skin, and lard them well, using a small needle. Place them in a deep dish, and season with salt and pepper, adding one onion and one carrot cut in small pieces, and half a dozen tablespoonfuls of white wine. Let all soak together for two hours, then transfer all to a baking-pan, with some scraps of pork rind placed at the bottom of the pan, and put this in the oven to cook. Place the fillets on a dish, pour in the pan one gill of hot broth, allow it to come to the boil, strain it over the fillets and serve with poivrade sauce separately.
Five hare preparations run together here, all built on the same French template: a blood-thickened stew (the civet proper) and then fillets treated as quick roasts. The first recipe is the fullest and the others assume you have read it.
- The hinge: the blood liaisonThe blood and mashed liver go in at the very end and the sauce must never boil after that, or the proteins seize and the sauce breaks into dark grit. Hold it below a simmer — the original's "side of the fire" — and stir until it thickens and gloss appears. The Bourgeoise version's instruction to "boil again" after adding blood contradicts this; follow the first recipe instead.
- Sourcing hare and its bloodWild European hare is sold frozen by game dealers and almost never with the blood saved; ask a butcher who breaks game in-house, or buy pig's blood, a common modern substitute for a civet liaison. If you use blood, buy it fresh from a licensed supplier and keep it refrigerated — it spoils quickly.
- Rabbit insteadA 3 lb domestic rabbit stands in for hare, but it is far leaner and paler. Cut the braising time to about 45 minutes and expect a lighter sauce; without blood, finish with a spoonful of the liver pounded with butter.
- "Boil for an hour" is too hard and often too shortAn older wild hare wants a bare simmer for 1.5 to 2.5 hours until the meat pulls from the bone. A rolling boil for an hour will leave the legs stringy and cloud the sauce you are about to reduce.
- UnitsOne gill is half a cup. A wineglassful was conventionally reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, so half a wineglassful of white wine in the French-style marinade is only about two tablespoons — a token amount, and worth increasing if you want the marinade to do anything.
- "A few species"A printer's error for "spices" — read it as whole peppercorns, a clove or two and a blade of mace, tied with the parsley so they strain out with the bunch.
- BaconNineteenth-century bacon was salt-cured and hard; blanching drew out the salt. Modern smoked bacon usually needs no blanching, and unsmoked pancetta or salt pork gives a result closer to the intended lardons. Salt the stew only at the end.
- Oven and pan notesFor the fillets with poivrade sauce, no temperature is given: use 350F and pull them at an internal 135-140F, since hare loin dries out within minutes. "Stewpan" throughout means a heavy lidded saucepan or Dutch oven on the stovetop, not a baking dish.
- Artichoke bottoms and mushroom trimmingsArtichoke bottoms mean trimmed hearts, then and now; frozen ones work. "Trimmings of mushrooms" is the professional kitchen's stalks and peelings saved for flavor — a handful of chopped cremini stems does the same job.
- YieldOne hare of about 6 lb serves four to six as a main course, with the sauce reduced to roughly a pint. Serve with the fried croutons the third version calls for, and something starchy — noodles or potato purée — to take the sauce.
Civet takes its name from cive, the old French for onion or chive: the defining marks of the dish are the small glazed onions and the sauce bound with the animal's own blood, a technique documented in French cookery well before Carême and still standard in civet de lièvre today. That a New York hotel book of the period gives five hare preparations says a good deal about the time — American restaurants of the 1890s bought and sold wild game freely, and hotel menus listed hare, venison, canvasback and plover as a matter of course. Market hunting on that scale was gradually curtailed by the Lacey Act of 1900 and later state game laws, which is often said to be a large part of why hare has since disappeared from American kitchens while remaining ordinary in France. The insistence on saving the blood also reflects a whole-animal thrift that a hotel garde-manger, receiving game undressed, could take for granted and a supermarket shopper cannot.