This post could be subtitled, “Why the French aren’t all bad.” But then I could also fall back on the fact that this recipe is equally well-known in Britain, where it is known as Jugged Hare. Civet de Lievre sounds so much better, though…

Pause for a moment and think about this recipe. Jugged hare, civet of hare, whatever you call it, this is a recipe George Washington would have known and probably ate. Hell, John Smith would have been able to eat an early version of jugged hare back in Jamestown a century before Washington — if he had access to some good wine.

Flash forward four centuries, and access to good wine is no longer an issue: Access to a hare is. Isn’t a hare a rabbit? Not in the least. Hares, mostly known as jackrabbits in the United States, live longer, run faster, are smarter and are generally tougher to eat — and to catch. Hares have red meat like beef, not white meat, like rabbits or chickens.

Can you buy a hare? Yes, but there is only one place I know of: D’Artagnan meats. But buying a wild Scottish hare will cost you more than $60. That’s about $15 per person, as a hare typically feeds four. I prefer to shoot jackrabbits, when I can find them. There is no season on them in California, so they are fair game all year long.

Scared off yet? I hope not, because civet of hare is a truly special dish. It is one of those recipes that hearkens back to the days of Brillat-Savarin, or Antonin Careme or Escoffier. This is the real deal, folks, and it ain’t easy to make. But it’s worth it.

Look at this lovely dish: Perfectly braised hare, tender, deeply flavored and meaty. It is accompanied by fresh chanterelle mushrooms, which are one of princes of the mycological realm. But the real hero of this dish is the sauce. Silky, rich, with a depth of flavor that makes you shut up and think about what you just put in your mouth — Oh yes, folks, civet of hare is definitely worth it.

My chief inspiration for my own version of jugged hare is Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking of Southwest France, and if you are a duck hunter (or just a lover of duck and goose) you really need this book. It has whole sections on what to do with every part of the bird, and has proved to be an invaluable resource in my own explorations of eating everything but the quack.

I made this dish last weekend with a jackrabbit I had frozen back in September. I get so few hares every year that I always feel the need to do something special with them. So I began my civet on Friday.

You need to marinate the hare in wine and brandy (with the alcohol burned off) for at least a day. Then you brown the hare and the vegetables from the marinade, then clarify the marinade itself.

The dish then needs nearly three hours of gentle heat to turn a tough old hare into a meltingly tender meal. And then there’s the sauce, which must be pushed through a food mill or otherwise blended. Don’t have a food mill? Buy one. I use mine almost every week. But you’re not done yet.

There is something different about a civet, or a jugged dish. Hares, by the by, aren’t the only animals “jugged.” Venison, ducks, geese, etc all appear cooked in this fashion. What they all have in common is that the sauce is thickened with the blood and liver of the animal, pureed with heavy cream. Pretty scary, eh? I thought so.

If you are a hunter, you will want to save some blood from the hare in a small container, mixed with a little red wine vinegar to preserve it. If not, you can either wrangle some pork blood from an Asian market or just skip it altogether. Blood is good to have, but not as critical as the liver.

Definitely keep the hare’s liver if you hunted it, although you will need to watch for sick livers — they will be striated, or have white specks in them or will look otherwise “not right.” And be sure to wear gloves when butchering rabbits and hares in California; there is a disease called tularemia that one in a million rabbits will be carrying. I have never seen it, but better safe than sorry.

Even safer would be to use a duck’s liver, or if you are not a hunter, a chicken liver or two. Buzz it in a food processor with the heavy cream and marvel at how disturbingly similar it looks to Strawberry Quik. Ew. No matter, this mixture gets stirred into your finished sauce to thicken it.

Why all this bother? Because back in the 17th and 18th centuries, adding blood and pureed livers was an accepted way to thicken a sauce and add flavor at the same time. Can you make an arrowroot or corn starch slurry and thicken your civet? Yes, but then it wouldn’t really be the same, now would it?

It is all a lot of work. But what’s important about all this is not so much that you attempt to make an authentic civet of hare. What isimportant is to respect the techniques and ideas the founders of haute cuisine developed centuries ago. Even if you only do it occasionally, there is something deeply satisfying about taking the time to do things the Old Way, to go through the effort of straining, and clarifying and braising, and so on — you may be surprised at how much those old Frenchmen knew.