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Roast of Hare
(Arrosto di lepre) The part of the hare fitted for roast is the hind quarters, but the limbs of this game are covered with little skins that must be carefully removed, before cooking, without cutting the muscles.
Before roasting keep it soaking for twelve or fourteen hours in a liquid prepared as follows: put on the fire in a kettle three tumblers of water with half a tumbler of vinegar or less in proportion with the piece to be cooked, three of four scallions chopped fine, one or two bay-leaves, a bunch of parsley, a little salt and a pinch of pepper; make it boil for five or six minutes, cool and pour when cold over the hare. When you remove the latter from the liquid wipe it and lard it all with little pieces of good bacon.
Cook on a low fire, salt it sufficiently and grease with cream and nothing else. Never use the liver of the hare which, it is said, is very indigestible.
A lean wild-game roast built around two steps that matter more than the cooking itself: stripping the silverskin and a long acidulated soak. Both are worth doing properly; the oven work is simple.
- The hinge: remove the silverskinThe "little skins" over the saddle and hind legs are sheets of connective tissue that shrink hard in the heat and warp the meat. Slide a thin flexible blade under an edge, angle it upward, and pull the membrane taut as you cut so you take skin and not muscle.
- TumblersA tumbler here is an ordinary drinking glass, roughly 8 fl oz. So the marinade is about 3 cups water to no more than 1/2 cup vinegar, scaled down for a small piece.
- Marinate coldThe instruction to cool the liquid before pouring it on is the period's only safeguard. Marinate in the refrigerator for the full 12 to 14 hours, not on a counter; the vinegar acidifies the surface but will not hold raw game safe at room temperature.
- ScallionsItalian-English translations of this period are loose about alliums, and "scallions" here may well stand for scalogni, shallots. Either works; shallots are probably closer to the intent.
- Larding and the creamHare is extremely lean and has almost no intramuscular fat, which is why the recipe insists on larding with bacon and basting with cream rather than stock. Use a larding needle, or lay barding fat over the top and baste every 15 minutes so the surface never dries.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "a low fire" and gives no oven setting; if you work in an oven, keep it low, in the region of 300-325F. Hind legs from an older animal are tough enough that they are often braised instead, with only the saddle roasted.
- DonenessThe saddle is usually served pink, but wild hare is safer taken to at least 145F and then rested; legs need to go well past that, to 175F or beyond, before the connective tissue gives way.
- SourcingTrue hare is sold by game dealers, often frozen and already skinned; a dressed hare of around 5-6 lb will serve four to six. Farmed rabbit is milder and will not need the full soak.
- The liverThe warning is folklore rather than fact, but hare liver is strongly flavored and bitter, and wild game offal is worth skipping unless you know the source.
The Italian Cook Book (1919), compiled by Maria Gentile, draws much of its structure and many of its dishes from Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, the book that did more than any other to give a unified domestic Italian cookery a written form. Hare, lepre, was a staple of that repertoire and quite distinct from rabbit in the Italian kitchen: darker, stronger, and traditionally the product of autumn shooting rather than the hutch. The acidulated soak with vinegar, bay and parsley is the old marinata, used across northern Italy to soften the muscle and blunt the gamy edge of an animal that might have hung several days. Basting with cream "and nothing else" reflects a practical fact about the animal rather than a flourish, since hare carries too little fat to survive a dry oven, and the injunction against the liver is the kind of received household caution that the 1919 text passes on while carefully attributing it to what "it is said."