Home › The Principles of Cookery › RABBIT, CROQUETTES (M. Ude's way)
RABBIT, CROQUETTES (M. Ude's way)
Cut the meat of young roasted rabbits into dice, which throw into some bechamel boiled down, adding a little glaze of game. Let this cool, then roll it into whatever shape you please, either into balls, or into the shape of a cork or pear. Fry the croquettes and send up like other croquettes; garnish with fried parsley in the centre of the dish. It is necessary to observe respecting croquettes, or any other articles made use of in cookery, that the less you handle them the better. Put the preparation of the croquettes in a flat long dish; level it with the knife till you have it the thickness required: mark with the knife the number of croquettes you intend to make. Then take them off the dish, roll them in your hand as little as possible, put them in the crumbs of bread, roll them again in the omelet (eggs beaten with a little salt), and make them of equal sizes; place them in a cover of a stewpan till such time as you wish to fry them, and serve very hot.
Ude's croquettes are a use for leftover roast rabbit bound in a very stiff sauce. The whole thing turns on the binding being thick enough and cold enough to hold its shape in hot fat.
- "Bechamel boiled down"This is not pouring sauce. Reduce a well-made bechamel until it mounds on the spoon and pulls away from the pan — closer to a thick pastry cream. A slack sauce will burst the crumb coating in the fryer.
- Glaze of gameA glace de gibier: game stock (rabbit, hare or venison bones) reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A tablespoon of concentrated demi-glace or a strong reduced brown stock stands in for it; without something of the kind the filling tastes only of milk.
- Chill hardWhere Ude says "let this cool," read at least three hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. Spread it in the flat dish and level it to an even thickness as he directs — he names no measurement — then score it into portions cold; that is what lets you shape each piece with almost no handling.
- The breading orderAs written, crumbs come before the beaten egg. That works only as the second half of the usual sequence: flour or crumb lightly, then egg, then crumb again. Modern practice is flour, egg, crumbs, and a second egg-and-crumb pass for anything this soft.
- "The omelet"Nothing to do with an omelette in the modern sense — it is simply whole eggs beaten with salt, used as the glue. A teaspoon of oil beaten in helps it coat evenly.
- "A cover of a stewpan"The upturned lid of a saucepan, used as a tray. Any flat plate or parchment-lined sheet does the job; keep the shaped croquettes in the refrigerator, uncovered, until the fat is ready.
- FryingDeep-fry at 350–375F, a few at a time, for 2 to 3 minutes — long enough to colour the crust and warm the centre. The rabbit is already cooked, so a longer fry only risks the filling boiling out.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs completely and drop them into the same fat for 10 to 15 seconds, until they stop hissing and turn a deep green. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- YieldUde gives no quantities (he writes of 'rabbits' in the plural). As a rough guide, the meat of one roasted rabbit, perhaps a pound picked, with about a cup of reduced bechamel, should give something like 12 to 16 croquettes — four servings as a first course.
"M. Ude" is Louis Eustache Ude, French-trained chef to Lord Sefton and later to Crockford's club in London, whose The French Cook (1813) went through many English editions and was still being quarried by later compilers such as Cassell's. The croquette itself belongs to the same tradition of thrift dressed as elegance: a household that had roasted a rabbit had cold meat to account for, and dicing it into a reduced sauce, breading it and frying it turned scraps into a course fit to send up with fried parsley. Ude's aside about handling the mixture as little as possible is characteristic of him — his books are full of that sort of workshop instruction, addressed to a professional kitchen rather than a cook working from a list. Rabbit was cheap and common in Victorian Britain, wild in autumn and winter and increasingly hutch-raised in towns, which is why a dictionary of cookery of this date can afford it a number of entries and treat it, as here, as an everyday raw material for a French preparation.