the foodies handbook

This is the recipe that inspired the words "First Catch your Hare" - a phrase that doesn't actually appear in The Art of Cookery but for which Hannah Glasse is famous. The clue is in the first line: cas'd means catched (or caught). The "pudding" is a stuffing, the element that lifts this simple country recipe to an elegant dinner party dish for the aspirational 18th-century metropolitan.

Take your Hare when it is cas'd and make pudding; take a quarter of a pound of sewet [suet], and as much crumbs of bread, a little parsley shred fine, and about as much thyme as will rest on a six-pence, when shred; an anchovy, shred small, a very little pepper and salt, some nutmeg , two eggs, a little lemon-peel: mix all this together, and put it into the hare. Sew up the belly, spit it [put on to a spit], and lay it to the fire, which must be a good one. Your dripping pan must be very clean and nice. Put two quarts milk and half a pound of butter into the pan; keep basting it all the while it is roasting with the butter and milk until the whole is used, and your hare will be enough [done]. You may mix the liver in the pudding, if you like it. You must first parboil it, and then chop it fine.