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Roasted Hare with Cream Sauce
Prepare a hare and if it is an old one lard it with fine strips of bacon. Boil the liver, chop it and mix half of it with enough chopped beef-suet, herbs, salt, pepper and grated nutmeg to taste, and bind the whole together with beaten egg. Stuff the hare with the mixture, sew it up and fix it in front of a clear fire, putting it some distance off at first and afterwards bringing it closer. Baste with three pints of milk until half cooked and then finish with butter. Prepare the following sauce for it: Pour the milk with which the hare was first basted into a saucepan, put in a bunch of sweet herbs, let it stew within twenty minutes of the hare being cooked, and then strain it.
This is a spit-roast written for an open hearth, and the milk basting is the part that makes it work: it keeps lean hare from drying and it becomes the sauce. Everything else can be adapted to an oven without much loss.
- The hinge: catch the milkThe three pints of milk are not a marinade but a continuous baste, and the dripped milk plus rendered fat is the entire sauce. If you roast on a rack, set it over a shallow pan so nothing is lost, and skim the fat before the milk goes into the saucepan with the herbs.
- Hare, and what to buyHare comes from game dealers and some online butchers, often skinned and headless, typically in the region of 5-7 lb; a young one needs no larding. A rabbit of 2-3 lb will stand in but is milder, much leaner and cooks appreciably faster.
- Larding an old hareLarding means threading strips of pork fat or streaky bacon through the lean saddle and hind legs with a larding needle. Barding — tying sheets of fat or bacon over the back — achieves nearly the same thing with none of the equipment.
- From spit to oven"Some distance off at first and afterwards bringing it closer" is hearth language for starting gently and finishing hot. In an oven, roast at 325F until nearly done, then raise to 425F for the last fifteen minutes to colour the skin.
- DonenessHare is dark and dries fast. Take the thigh to 160-165F, which for a whole hare is roughly an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half at 325F, and rest it fifteen minutes before carving.
- The stuffingBeef suet is sold shredded in the baking aisle or can be had from a butcher; chilled and grated it behaves the same way. "Sweet herbs" means the mild kitchen herbs — parsley, thyme, marjoram, a bay leaf — not anything sugared. The recipe uses only half the boiled liver, so keep the rest to mash into the finished sauce for body.
- The sauce needs helpStrained milk drippings alone will be thin and may look broken after long basting and reduction. Reduce hard, then whisk in a little beurre manie or the reserved chopped liver; a spoonful of cream steadies it. Season at the end, since reduction concentrates the salt.
- YieldA whole hare with stuffing serves four to six.
Oscar Tschirky's book came out in 1896, when American hotel kitchens still leaned heavily on English game cookery, and this recipe follows the familiar English pattern for roast hare: larded, stuffed with a suet-and-liver forcemeat, hung before a clear fire and basted with milk. The milk basting is generally explained as a way to protect flesh so lean that it has essentially no fat of its own, and the same technique turns up in nineteenth-century household manuals. Hare was sold in the New York game trade in this period, and the instructions still assume the open fire that coal ranges were displacing.