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Splitting hares

This article is more than 23 years old
The readers' editor on... a question of attribution

Give me a moment to catch my breath. I have spent quite a long time this week in the entirely pleasurable pursuit of a hare, a hare started by one of our columnists on Tuesday. By the way - while I am panting - the Concise Oxford Dictionary says, very mildly, that the expression "start a hare" means "raise a topic of conversation"; but Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (revised edition, 1981) comes closer to the real meaning, in my opinion, by adding the usually relevant word "irrelevant" to the definition. The hare in this sense is a relative of the red herring.

The column on Tuesday was about crime and punishment and it finished like this: "...it doesn't matter a hoot how beastly you intend to be to villains if you don't collar them first. Mrs Beeton formulated the first law of criminology, albeit in a different context: 'First catch your hare'."

This brought an immediate email from a reader who said, "Actually, she didn't." Nowhere in the admirable works of Isabella Beeton, he maintained, is anything remotely similar to be found. Certainly there is nothing like it in the undated (perhaps 1930s) edition of Mrs Beeton's Family Cookery that I have before me, although she has a great deal to say about hares. She tells me, not how to catch one, but how, when they are in season from September to March, to select from the market a good, young one ("The ears are tender and easily torn"); advises me to hang it for about a week (depending on the weather) and not to paunch [disembowel] it until required for cooking.

She tells me how to skin it - by hanging it from a hook so that both hands may be employed in the task. She instructs me in the preparation of jugged hare - a recipe that Auntie Win used on the farm at Hockliffe in my childhood - and gives the recipes for a wide variety of other hare-y dishes. But nowhere does she remind me that I must first catch the hare before I can cook it.

So who did say it? Here is Brewer again: "First catch your hare. This direction is generally attributed to Hannah Glasse, habit-maker to the Prince of Wales, and author of The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy (1747). Her actual directions are, 'Take your Hare when it is cas'd, [cased] and make a pudding ...etc' To 'case' means to take off the skin..."

The Oxford English Dictionary says, rather playfully, "First catch your hare (ie as the first step to cooking him): a direction jestingly [my italics] ascribed to Mrs Glasse's Cookery Book [1747], but of much more recent origin."

The Dictionary of National Biography, which says (correctly) that Mrs Glasse was the habit maker to the Princess - not the Prince - of Wales, fails to enlighten us: "The attribution to Mrs Glasse of the proverb 'First catch your hare' has occasioned some discussion. The proverb is not found in her Art of Cookery, but her words, 'Take your hare when it is cased' may have suggested it."

It should be said, perhaps, that simple instructions such as this (don't try to cook it with the skin on) were more Mrs Glasse's cup of tea than Mrs Beeton's. As Mrs Glasse herself said, "If I have not wrote in the polite Stile I hope I shall be forgiven; for my Intention is to instruct the lower Sort." Do not be confused by the title of a recent edition of Mrs Glasse's book: First Catch Your Hare (details below). The book dismisses as a myth the attachment of the phrase to Mrs Glasse.

Brewer asserts, " 'First catch your hare,' is a very old phrase..." then it points to a passage in "the 13th century Bracton". This is the work of the jurist Henry de Bracton, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England). But what Bracton says, as Brewer concedes, is "It is commonly said that you must first catch your deer, when it is caught, skin it." Obviously we are not having that: a deer is not a hare.

No, we come back to the OED's contention that the phrase is of much more recent origin than the mid-18th century of Mrs Glasse's book. The OED finds a reference in Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, 1855: " 'A soldier, Prince, must needs obey his orders: mine are . . . to seize wherever I should light upon him.' 'First catch your hare!' exclaimed his Royal Highness." It also notes this reference from the Times, August 25 1858: "Bitter experience has taught us not to cook our hare before we have caught it."

Both references are, in any case, before the appearance of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in parts from 1859 to 1861 when it appeared for the first time in book form.

The hare is still running and I doubt we shall ever catch it.

First Catch Your Hare: The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, a facsimile of the first edition with essays by Jennifer Stead and Priscilla Bain, Prospect Books £27.50. Thanks to Dermod Quirke for help in chasing the hare, and to Ian Aitken who started it running. Readers may contact the office of the readers' editor by telephoning 020-7239 9589 between 11am and 5pm Monday to Friday. Surface mail to Readers' editor, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. Fax 020-7239 9897. Email: reader@theguardian.com

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