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Rabbit Sauted
Skin and clean well a young rabbit and cut it up into joints. Put a few pieces of ham into a sautepan with a little butter, toss the pan over the fire for a few minutes, add the pieces of rabbit and a little each of finely-chopped parsley, thyme and onion, and cook for a few minutes longer; sprinkle flour over the rabbit, pour in stock and white wine in equal proportions and enough to moisten, remove the pan to the side of the fire, and simmer gently until the meat is quite tender. Place the meat on a dish to keep it hot; pour the sauce through a sieve into a saucepan, add a few chopped mushrooms, stew for a few minutes longer, pour it over the rabbit, and serve very hot.
A straightforward fricassée in all but name: brown, flour, moisten, simmer. The original assumes a coal range with a hot centre and a cooler edge, and a cook who knows what a rabbit joint looks like.
- JointingA rabbit breaks into seven or eight pieces: two forelegs, two hind legs, the saddle cut across into two or three, and the ribcage. Rabbit is often sold already jointed, and a 2½–3 lb animal serves three.
- "A young rabbit"Age mattered when rabbits were wild and could be anything up to two years old. Farmed rabbit is uniformly young and tender; wild rabbit still wants a longer, gentler simmer and rewards it with more flavour.
- The hamTwo or three ounces of raw ham or unsmoked bacon, diced, is the intent — it is there for fat and salt, not as a garnish. Heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the sauce.
- "Remove the pan to the side of the fire"This is the hinge of the dish. It means drop to the barest simmer — around 45 minutes for farmed rabbit, up to 1½ hours for wild. Rabbit is very lean and a rolling boil will make it stringy long before it is tender.
- Stock and wine "in equal proportions"About a cup of each, enough to moisten the meat as the recipe asks rather than to cover it. Dry white wine, and chicken or veal stock rather than beef, which would overwhelm it.
- Sieving the sauceStraining removes the herbs and ham and gives a clean sauce; press the solids to get the body out of them. If the sauce is thin after the mushrooms have stewed, reduce it rather than adding more flour.
- MushroomsCultivated white or cremini, chopped and stewed in the sauce five to eight minutes. They will release liquid, which is part of the plan.
- ServingRice, buttered noodles or plain boiled potatoes. The dish cools fast on the plate, which is why Oscar insists on "very hot."
Rabbit was ordinary food in the New York of Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf, sold by butchers alongside poultry and treated in the kitchen much as chicken was — hence a preparation that is essentially a white fricassée, with ham for fat, a flour-thickened wine-and-stock sauce and mushrooms finishing it. The technique is French: sauté here retains its older restaurant sense of a dish begun in a shallow pan over heat and then finished in its own moistened sauce, rather than the quick dry frying the word now suggests in English. Oscar's book, published in 1896, gathers hundreds of such workaday European preparations beside the hotel's showpieces, and the presence of rabbit among them is a reminder that it fell out of the American diet only later — a decline often attributed to chicken becoming cheap and available year-round.