Home › The Principles of Cookery › RABBIT, BOUDINS OF (a la Reine)
RABBIT, BOUDINS OF (a la Reine)
Prepare in the same manner as croquettes (see RABBIT, CROQUETTES OF: M. Ude's way); roll the meat into large boudins, sausage shape, dip into egg and bread-crumbs, and fry them. Serve under them some veloute, with a little glaze of game. For croquettes or boudins a la reine, made of fowls, rabbits, or game, if you should have by you some sweetbreads, they will be a great improvement, as they make them more mellow and delicate.
This is a shaping-and-frying instruction that leans entirely on another entry: the mixture is the croquette forcemeat, a thick velouté- or béchamel-bound mince of cooked rabbit. Everything depends on that binding being stiff enough to hold a sausage shape.
- The hinge: chill the mixture hardThe bound mince must be spread on a plate, cooled and refrigerated until it is firm enough to cut and roll without slumping — at least two hours, and overnight is better. Warm or loose forcemeat bursts in the fat and empties the boudin.
- What a boudin means hereNot blood sausage and not a casing of any kind. In this sense a boudin is simply a croquette rolled long and cylindrical, roughly the thickness of a thumb and three inches or so long, so it fries evenly.
- "A la reine"In nineteenth-century French kitchen usage the term generally points to a white preparation of poultry, extended here to rabbit and game, bound in a white sauce. It is a description of the mixture, not an extra ingredient.
- Egg and bread-crumbsFlour the pieces lightly first, then egg wash, then fine dry crumbs. A second coat of egg and crumbs is worth the trouble on something this soft. Rest the breaded boudins in the refrigerator 30 minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- FryingDeep fat at 350–375F, two to three minutes, until the crumb is deep gold. The filling is already cooked, so you are only heating it through and crisping the shell; longer frying pushes the sauce inside to a boil and splits the coating.
- Velouté and "glaze of game"Velouté is a light stock sauce thickened with a white roux. The glaze is meat glace — game or brown stock reduced until it is syrupy and coats a spoon — dribbled over as a garnish. Reduced brown chicken or veal stock does the job; a spoonful of commercial demi-glace is a reasonable shortcut.
- SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, trimmed of membrane and pressed under a weight before being diced into the mixture. They are an order item at most butchers now rather than something you happen to have by you.
- YieldThe rabbit from one animal, roughly a pound of picked cooked meat, gives eight to ten boudins — four servings as a main course with the sauce, more as a first course.
The M. Ude invoked in the cross-reference is Louis Eustache Ude, the French chef who cooked for the Duke of York and later ran the kitchen at Crockford's club in London; his The French Cook (1813) was among the works that brought this style of French forcemeat work before an English readership. Croquettes and boudins of this kind were typically a thrifty second act rather than a dish in their own right: the picked meat of yesterday's roast or braised rabbit, bound in a stiff white sauce and re-dressed as something fried and sauced. Rabbit was cheap and widely trapped, and the entry offers sweetbreads as the improvement that makes the mixture "more mellow and delicate" — a suggestion it extends equally to fowls and game. The compiler, working from earlier French professional literature for a middle-class audience, kept the grand terminology of velouté and glaze of game while the substance of the dish remained leftovers made presentable.