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Rabbit Klosse
Mince finely the white meat of a cold cooked rabbit. Soak an equal quantity of bread in cold milk, squeeze it dry, and mix with the minced meat. Cut one or two slices of fat bacon into small squares and fry them gently. Add the minced rabbit and bread, and stir in one or two eggs. Let the mixture cook a few minutes. Turn it out on a dish, and when cool add two more eggs. Form it into balls the size of an egg, and be careful to handle them lightly, and to dip the fingers frequently in water while doing so. When wanted drop these gently into boiling water, and boil them until they are set. Lift them out with a skimmer, pile them in the centre of a small dish, and surround them with fried potatoes. Send any piquant sauce or gravy to table with them. Time to boil, about ten minutes.
A leftovers dish built on the German Klöße principle: bread, meat and egg poached as dumplings. The whole thing hinges on the water, which must never actually boil hard.
- Poach, do not boilDespite the wording, bring the water to the boil and then drop it back to a bare shiver, around 180-190F, before the balls go in. At a rolling boil these will shed bread and egg into the pot and collapse. Ten minutes at a tremble is right for egg-sized dumplings; sacrifice one as a test before committing the rest.
- "An equal quantity of bread"The recipe does not say whether this is by bulk or weight, nor whether the bread is measured before or after soaking; the wording puts the quantity before the soaking, but measuring the squeezed crumb against the meat gives a workable mixture. Use stale white crumb, not sliced sandwich bread, which turns to paste. If the mixture will not hold a shape, add crumb rather than more egg.
- The two additions of eggThe first egg or two is stirred into the hot pan and briefly cooked, which sets the mixture and dries it. The second pair goes in only once the mass is cold, and is the actual binder. Adding all the eggs at once gives a slack mixture that will not form balls.
- RabbitFarmed rabbit is mild; wild rabbit is leaner and stronger and needs the bacon fat. Cold roast chicken breast can stand in, by the same weight.
- Fat baconPeriod fat bacon meant a cut with a broad band of fat, closer to today's streaky bacon or pancetta than to lean back bacon. Fry it gently so the fat renders out without the squares browning hard; that rendered fat is most of the seasoning.
- Season itThe recipe names no salt, pepper or nutmeg, which the reader was assumed to add. Season the mixture before it cools and taste a small fried nugget of it; poached dumplings cannot be corrected later.
- "Any piquant sauce"Piquant here points to something sharp: a brown gravy finished with vinegar, capers, mustard or chopped gherkin. Something acidic is worth having, as bread-and-rabbit dumplings are bland on their own.
- YieldA cold rabbit's white meat with its equal bulk of bread should give something in the region of eight to ten egg-sized dumplings, enough for perhaps four with the fried potatoes.
Klösse (properly Klöße) are the German family of boiled dumplings, from bread and potato ones served with roasts to the meat-bound kind here, and their appearance in an English dictionary of cookery reflects both the traffic of German cooks and German cookbooks into Victorian and Edwardian kitchens and the domestic pressure to use up cold meat without simply serving hash again. The book treats a cooked rabbit as an unremarkable staple rather than game: rabbit was cheap, widely trapped and sold, and turned up in pies, curries and mince. The technique itself is older and broader than the dish, a panade of soaked bread bound with egg being the same principle behind quenelles, forcemeat balls and German Fleischklößchen; the frank instruction to wet the fingers and handle the balls lightly is the kind of hand-taught detail one associates with household rather than professional writing.