Hare Soup
(Poland.) Cook the bones, trimmings, gravy, and stuffing of some cooked rabbit with 3 onions, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, sliced, 2 cloves, a little mace, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, and a piece of celery. Add 1 ounce of butter, and then, when fried together, add 1 quart of beef stock. Cook 2 hours, strain it, taking out the bones and pressing the rest through a sieve. Add 1 dozen forcemeat balls, made of breadcrumbs, chopped ham, herbs, egg, and butter, and poached in stock, a tablespoonful of port wine, and salt and pepper.
This is a leftovers soup dressed up as game soup: it starts from the carcass, trimmings and stuffing of a rabbit already served at table. The order of operations in the original is compressed, so read it twice before starting.
- The instruction that mattersThe recipe does put the butter and the frying before the stock: fry the bones, trimmings and vegetables in the butter until they take colour, then add the quart of stock. That browning is what gives the soup its depth; skip it and you have thin vegetable broth.
- Hare or rabbitThe title says hare, the method says rabbit, and the book means whichever you had for dinner. Hare gives a much darker, stronger soup; farmed rabbit is mild and will lean more on the beef stock. Either works.
- Quantities and yieldOne quart (4 cups) of beef stock, plus the gravy and the sieved vegetables and scraps, will reduce over two hours by an amount that depends on your pan and heat; reckon on a few small first-course servings. If you want more, start with more stock and expect a slightly lighter body.
- Mace and cloves"A little mace" would most likely be a blade of mace, the lacy husk of nutmeg, sold whole in spice shops; ground mace substitutes, somewhere around a quarter to a half teaspoon. Two cloves is genuinely two whole cloves — stick them into an onion so you can find them again.
- SievingPull out the bones, cloves, bay and thyme stalks, then press the cooked vegetables and meat scraps through a sieve back into the liquid. This is what thickens the soup; a food mill does it faster, a blender makes it cloudy and pasty.
- Forcemeat ballsBind breadcrumbs, finely chopped ham, herbs and softened butter with one beaten egg, roll into marbles no bigger than a hazelnut, and poach them in simmering stock for 4–5 minutes until firm. Poach them separately from the soup so any that break up do not cloud it.
- The portA single tablespoon goes in at the end, with the salt and pepper. It reads as a seasoning rather than a flavour in its own right, and is better not boiled hard.
- Salt lastTwo hours of reduction concentrates whatever salt was in the stock, the ham and the original stuffing. Taste before adding any.
Soups built on the bones of yesterday's roast were the backbone of nineteenth-century household economy, and hare soup in particular was a fixture of British and Central European cookery — dark, spiced with mace and clove, finished with a spoonful of fortified wine and a scattering of forcemeat balls. The Polish attribution here reflects a real regional fondness for hare; Polish cooking is also often said to finish game dishes with something sweet or wine-like to cut the muskiness. The recipe reads like a dish translated into the units and ingredients of an English-speaking kitchen. That translation is why the recipe cheerfully substitutes rabbit for hare and beef stock for a proper game broth — and why the stuffing from last night's dinner ends up in the pot.