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Stewed Hare
Skin and wash a hare, draw off all the blood and cut into halves through the middle. Lard the hare as thickly as possible and put it into a saucepan covered at the bottom with slices of bacon. Place a large bunch of parsley in a muslin bag with a few bay leaves, a little thyme, a clove, sweet basil, spices and add with four onions, two or three carrots, two calf's feet and a few pieces of bacon cut from the breast; dust over a little salt and pepper and add one pint of white wine and two tablespoonfuls of broth. Place a round of well-buttered paper over the hare to keep it from burning or becoming dry, place the lid on the saucepan, seal hermetically by luting the rim and edge with flour and water paste, and cook for three hours at the side of the fire and very gently. Take off the lid, remove the hare, drain and put it on a dish. Skim the liquor and pass it through a sieve. Place a little butter and flour in a saucepan and when it is of a light color add the liquor from the hare, boil it up, serve with the hare, but not poured over it.
A classic sealed braise: the hare cooks for three hours in its own steam, with calf's feet supplying the gelatin that gives the sauce body. Most of the work is in the setup, and the temperature is the part that goes wrong.
- "At the side of the fire"The cooler edge of a coal range or hearth, where a pot barely trembles. A low oven (somewhere around 275-300F) is an easier way to hold that today than a burner; the book gives no temperature, only "very gently" -- the liquid should never do more than sigh.
- Luting the lidThe flour-and-water paste around the rim is a seal, not decoration, and it is what makes the pint of wine and two spoonfuls of broth enough liquid for three hours. A tight-fitting lid plus a sheet of foil crimped over the rim does the same job, and you can skip the paste if the pot is heavy and the oven low.
- Larding"Lard as thickly as possible" means threading strips of chilled pork fatback through the meat with a larding needle. Hare is extremely lean and this is the whole reason the dish works. Barding instead — wrapping the halves in sheets of fatback or thin-sliced unsmoked bacon and tying them on — is the practical substitute.
- Calf's feetPurely for gelatin; they are not served. Ask a butcher to split two, or substitute two split pig's trotters. They are what makes the finished sauce cling rather than run.
- Sourcing the hareWild hare is a specialty order in the United States, and the recipe gives no weight; a whole hare of a few pounds will serve a party of six or so. Farmed rabbit will work but is much milder, and being smaller it cooks faster, so start checking earlier than the stated three hours.
- "Draw off all the blood"Hares are traditionally hung and paunched with the blood reserved, which in a civet would go into the sauce at the end. Here it is simply discarded — do not save it for this dish.
- The buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pot's diameter, buttered, laid directly on the meat. Parchment, not waxed paper.
- The sauceA blond roux: cook the butter and flour only to pale straw, not brown, then whisk in the strained, skimmed braising liquor and boil it up to thicken. The recipe is explicit that it is served with the hare but not poured over it, though it gives no reason.
- SpicesThe recipe just says "spices," leaving the mixture to the cook; a mild warm blend of the mace/nutmeg/pepper sort is the usual assumption. A clove is already specified separately, so keep any addition light.
Hare was standard restaurant game in the Waldorf's era, when American hotel kitchens ran on a French repertoire and imported both the game and the technique. The method here is what is generally traced to the old "en daube" braise — a sealed pot, aromatics in a muslin bag, calf's feet for body — that predates reliable ovens and was designed to work beside a coal fire, where a cook could park a pot at the cool end and leave it. Luting the lid with flour paste, often said to have been common practice in professional kitchens, seems largely to have disappeared with gas ranges and gasketed cookware. The insistence on larding tells you something too: hare is one of the leanest meats sold, and larding threads fat through the flesh itself to keep it from drying.