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January 2
Menu: Palestine Soup; Jugged Hare, Red Currant Jelly; Brussels Sprouts; Endive Salad; Potato Puff; Cheese Fingers; Vanilla Souffle Coffee Jugged Hare-1 hare, 1 cup Crisco, 1½ pounds gravy beef, 1 onion, 1 lemon, 6 cloves, 1 cup port wine, few forcemeat balls, salt, red pepper and pepper to taste. Skin, paunch and wash hare, cut it into pieces, dredge with flour, and fry in hot Crisco. Have ready 11/2 pints gravy, made from beef, and thickened with flour. Put this into jar; add pieces of fried hare, onion stuck with cloves, lemon peeled and sliced, and seasonings; cover jar tightly, put into saucepan of boiling water, and let it stew until hare is quite tender, taking care to keep the water boiling. When nearly ready pour in wine, add forcemeat balls, and allow to cook 10 minutes. Serve with red currant jelly. For forcemeat balls, mix together in basin, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons crumbs, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1/4 teaspoon poultry seasoning, ½ teaspoon grated lemon rind, seasoning of salt, pepper, red pepper, and paprika, and 1 beaten egg, form into small balls, roll in flour, and add to hare.
A classic English jugged hare set into a Crisco-era American menu book, where the shortening replaces the butter or suet the dish would once have used. The method is essentially a water-bath braise: a covered jar of hare and gravy sits in a pan of boiling water for hours.
- The jar is the whole techniqueThe "jar" would have been a stoneware or glazed earthenware vessel, covered and stood in a saucepan of boiling water so the meat never boils directly. A tightly covered pot in a low oven is a rough modern stand-in, though the water bath holds the contents just under boiling; if you use a glass or ceramic vessel in water, start it in cold water and bring it up together so it does not crack.
- "Skin, paunch and wash"Paunch means to gut. Hare today is usually sold dressed and often jointed, though it can still be bought in the fur. A whole hare of roughly 5-7 lb should feed about six.
- Gravy beefShin, leg or chuck — cheap collagen-rich cuts simmered for stock rather than served. The 1½ pints of thickened beef gravy is the braising liquid, roughly 3 cups; make it well ahead, as the recipe assumes it is standing ready.
- Timing"Until quite tender" for a mature hare in a water bath means 2½ to 3½ hours. Wild hare is dense, dark and worked; it will not soften on a chicken's schedule, and the water in the outer pan must be topped up so it never drops off the boil.
- Wine and forcemeat go in lastThe port and the balls get only ten minutes for a reason. Port simmered for hours loses its fruit and turns flat, and the egg-bound crumb balls disintegrate if given longer.
- CriscoStraight substitution: a cup of any neutral solid or liquid fat for the frying, 2 tablespoons of butter or lard in the forcemeat, where butter improves the flavour considerably.
- Poultry seasoningA pre-mixed American blend, mostly sage and thyme with marjoram and savoury. If you have none, use a scant ¼ teaspoon of dried sage and thyme together.
- What is missingTraditional jugged hare thickens the sauce at the end with the hare's reserved blood and liver. This version leaves it out entirely and relies on flour, which gives a cleaner but much less characteristic sauce. The red currant jelly on the side is not a garnish — its sharpness is what carries the richness.
Jugged hare is a long-established English game dish; recipes titled "To jug a hare" appear in eighteenth-century English cookery books, Hannah Glasse's among them, and the name is generally taken to refer to the jug or earthen crock the meat was sealed into and stood in boiling water. The method predates reliable ovens and was a way of getting long, even, gentle heat from a single pot on the fire. Its appearance here, in a promotional cookbook issued by Procter and Gamble to introduce hydrogenated vegetable shortening to American kitchens, says less about American hare-eating habits than about the book's ambitions: A Calendar of Dinners laid out a year of respectable menus, borrowing prestige from the English table, and every one of them was made to pass through a can of Crisco.