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RABBIT, MINCED (M. Ude's recipe)
"This is a dish to be made of the remains of a former dinner. Take the fillets of roasted rabbits, pare the sinews; then make a mince, but hold your knife on a slope, that the thin slices may curl like shavings; put the mince into some reduced veloute or bechamel mixed with some glaze of game; do not forget to pour into the mince a little thick cream to give it a white colour and make it more mellow. You may put the mince either in a bordure, a vol-au-vent, a casserole with rice, a turban, a grenade, a gratin, petits pates, petites casserolettes au ris (little casseroles with rice), etc. etc."
A leftovers dish from the era when a roast rabbit was expected to appear twice. The whole point is the cut: this is not ground meat but paper-thin curled shavings bound in a rich white sauce.
- Hold the knife on a slope"Mince" here means thin slicing, not mincing. Angle the blade so it takes long shavings off the fillet; these hold their shape in the sauce, where chopped meat turns to paste.
- Reduced velouté or béchamelThe recipe gives no quantities. Reduce the sauce until it coats a spoon heavily, using only enough to bind: too thin and the shavings sit in soup rather than being bound.
- Glaze of gameGlace de gibier is game stock reduced to a syrup. A tablespoon of strongly reduced rabbit or chicken stock does the same job; commercial demi-glace works but darkens the dish, which Ude is at pains to keep pale.
- The cream goes in off the boilThe cream -- The recipe does not say when to add it, but adding the thick cream at the end and bringing the mince only to a bare simmer is safest: cooked rabbit reheated hard in sauce goes stringy and the sauce can break.
- Reheating cooked meatLeftover roast rabbit should have been refrigerated promptly, and the finished mince should be hot through before serving. Do not hold it warm for long stretches on the back of the stove.
- "Casserole" and the other vesselsNone of these are baking dishes in the modern sense. A casserole with rice is a moulded case of cooked rice hollowed out to hold the mince; a bordure is a ring of rice or forcemeat; a turban a ring mould; a grenade a domed rice-crusted shape; a gratin a browned top; petits pâtés and casserolettes small pastry or rice cases. A vol-au-vent shell is the easiest of these to buy.
Louis Eustache Ude was a French chef who worked in England in the early nineteenth century, cooked for the Earl of Sefton and later ran the kitchen at Crockford's gaming club in St James's; his The French Cook, first published in 1813, went through many editions and was still in circulation when Cassell's compiled its dictionary decades later. This entry shows why: it is less a recipe than a method, assuming the cook already commands velouté, glaze and half a dozen moulded presentations, and leaving the choice of them to the day's needs. The thrift is characteristic of the period, when the remains of one dinner were commonly worked up into the next and the skill lay in making the reappearance unrecognisable. Rabbit was cheap and common on English tables through much of the nineteenth century, which is part of what qualified it for treatment this elaborate.