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Jugged Hare
(England.) Clean, skin, and cut up a rabbit; fry it in butter or a little dripping until brown. Mash and bone 2 anchovies; chop some herbs, mace, parsley, and lemon peel. Line an earthen jar or bowl with slices of bacon; put in the rabbit, with bacon and the above flavoring in layers, adding 4 tablespoonfuls of ale, and on the top some bacon and an earthen lid which must be fastened air-tight, with flour paste. Set in a saucepan of water and boil for 4 hours. Take off the cover and serve cold.
JUGGED HARE. (Another recipe. Yorkshire style.) Skin, clean, cut up, and fry a rabbit, in butter; put it in a wide stone crock with 1 glass of port wine, a little cinnamon, a clove, a bayleaf, juice of a lemon, over all, a layer of forcemeat, made of bread-crumbs, herbs, egg, and butter. Smooth the top, cover closely, and set in a pot of water. Cook 3 hours and serve with currant jelly.
Two versions of a dish whose method is the point: the meat is sealed in a lidded pot and cooked in a water bath, so nothing evaporates and the liquid is almost entirely the juices of the meat itself. Both recipes call for rabbit rather than hare, which tells you they were written for a cook shopping in a town.
- The hinge: it is a water bath, not a braiseThe sealed jar sits in a saucepan of simmering water, which holds the contents at just under 212F and no hotter, however long it goes. Keep the water level at least halfway up the jar and top it up with boiling water as it falls; a jar left standing in a dry pan will crack.
- VesselThe first recipe's "earthen jar" is a glazed earthenware or stoneware crock; the second specifies a "wide stone crock". A wide-mouth canning jar with the ring only loosely on, or a small lidded stoneware bean pot, does the same work. A lidded Dutch oven standing in a roasting tin of hot water in a low oven is a workable modern equivalent and easier to manage over three to four hours.
- Flour paste sealA stiff dough of flour and water, rolled into a rope and pressed round the lid rim, was the period's gasket. It is not airtight in any pressurised sense, it simply keeps steam and aroma in. Do not clamp or screw a lid down tight on anything going into boiling water.
- QuantitiesA "glass" of port in books of this period means a wineglassful, usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the measure was never standard. Four tablespoons of ale in the first recipe is genuinely all the liquid it asks for, and is meant to be: the bacon and rabbit supply the rest. Mace is unmeasured; a blade, or about a quarter teaspoon ground, is enough for one rabbit.
- AnchoviesTwo anchovy fillets, mashed to a paste, act as the salt and savour of the first version and will not read as fish in the finished dish. Bone them as directed if using salt-packed anchovies; oil-packed fillets need only draining.
- Cooking time and donenessThree to four hours suits a mature wild rabbit or hare. Farmed rabbit, which is what most butchers sell, is tender in about half that; check at 90 minutes and stop when the meat pulls from the bone, or it will shred to threads.
- ForcemeatIn the Yorkshire version the bread-crumb, herb, egg and butter mixture goes on top as a lid of stuffing and steams in place. Keep it loose rather than compacted, and expect it to absorb the port and juices rather than brown.
- Serving and yieldOne rabbit feeds three to four. The first recipe is served cold, when the bacon fat and juices set around the joints, so lift the pieces out with the set juices; the second is a hot dish, and the currant jelly is there to answer the port and lemon.
Jugging is one of the oldest surviving English pot methods, named for the jug or deep earthen crock the meat was sealed into and generally traced in print to the eighteenth century, though the technique of cooking a sealed vessel inside a pan of water is older still. Classic jugged hare thickened its gravy with the animal's blood, reserved when it was paunched, and was served with redcurrant jelly to cut the richness; this book keeps the jelly and the port but quietly drops the blood, and substitutes rabbit throughout, which is what a household cook was likely to be able to buy ready-killed.