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Potted Hare
Skin, draw, wash and bone a hare, keeping the blood to mix in with the force-meat. Cut off the meat from the shoulders, and half that of the legs, remove all skin and sinews and put this flesh into a mortar with twelve pounds of veal without skin or gristle, add one pound of fat bacon, both cut up small; pound it, and while doing so, add one ounce of spiced salt and the blood. Lard the body with pieces of fat bacon, cut it in halves, dust it over well with about two ounces of spiced salt, put it in a stewpan with one ounce of butter, and fry it for ten minutes. Put a layer of the forcemeat at the bottom of a pottingpan to about one inch in thickness, then put in half of the body, sprinkle it over with another ounce of spiced salt, then more forcemeat and so on, ending with a layer of forcemeat. Put a slice of bacon on top, a bayleaf on that, cover the pan, put it in a saucepan two inches deep with water, place the saucepan over the fire and cook for three hours or until done, which may be ascertained by piercing the flesh with a very clean trussing-needle. When done, let it get cold, cover with melted fat, and it is ready for use. It should not be used within a day or so of making, and if kept for a time, pork should be used instead of the veal, and in the same proportion.
This is a potted meat in the old sense: a terrine cooked in a water bath, then sealed under a cap of fat and held for days or weeks. The method, the undefined cure and at least one impossible quantity put it outside what can responsibly be reproduced.
- Sealing under fat is the problemA cooked meat paste capped with melted fat is an oxygen-free environment held at room temperature, which is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum to grow and produce toxin. Nothing in the recipe controls for it: no measured cure, no acidity, no stated storage temperature. Potted meats of this kind should be treated as a historical technique, not a working one.
- "Spiced salt" is undefinedSel épicé was a house mixture of salt with pepper and warm spices such as nutmeg and clove, often with thyme and bay, and some versions also included saltpetre. Whether this particular mixture contained a nitrate cure, and at what strength, is unknowable from the text — so the reader has no way to know whether the four ounces called for are preserving anything at all or merely seasoning.
- The veal quantity cannot be rightTwelve pounds of veal against the shoulder and part-leg meat of a single hare is far out of proportion for a forcemeat, and the surrounding quantities — one pound of bacon, one ounce of butter — suggest a much smaller figure was intended. Treat the number as a probable misprint rather than a working measure.
- Doneness by trussing-needlePiercing with a needle tells you the centre is hot and the juices run clear; it does not tell you a temperature. A three-hour bain-marie will almost certainly cook the loaf through, but the original offers no way to verify it, and for a preserved meat verification is the whole point.
- The raw bloodHare blood was worked into the forcemeat as a binder and for colour, the same principle as civet and lièvre à la royale. It is cooked in the finished loaf, but sourcing it now means a whole hare from a game dealer, bled and kept — not something a supermarket supplies.
- VesselsA "potting-pan" is a lidded earthenware or tinned terrine; the "saucepan two inches deep with water" is simply a bain-marie set over direct heat rather than in an oven. Neither term implies anything more exotic than a covered terrine in a water bath.
- If you want the dishUse a current, tested recipe for a game terrine, one that gives a core temperature and a refrigerated shelf life. Do not adapt this text by adding a modern cure to it.
Potting was one of England's ways of keeping cooked meat before reliable refrigeration: the flesh was pounded or packed close, cooked slowly, and sealed under clarified butter or rendered fat, which excluded air and extended the keeping time. Hare was the natural candidate and arriving in quantity during the season. By the time Oscar Tschirky assembled this book in 1896, the technique had largely migrated from the still-room to the professional larder, where it survives as the terrine and the pâté en terrine; the fat cap that was once a preservative is now mostly decorative. The instruction to substitute pork for veal "if kept for a time" reflects the older kitchen's working knowledge that fattier meat held better than lean veal — an observation about spoilage made without any of the microbiology that would eventually explain it.