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Salmis of Hare
Clean and skin a hare, split it down the back and cut off all the fillets with their bones attached. Put the remainder of the hare into a saucepan with a rich sauce and stew until the meat will easily leave the bones; stew also the liver together with a little calf's liver and pound them in a mortar with butter and seasoning; also pound the stewed flesh of the hare with more seasoning and butter, keeping them separate from the liver. Put two breakfast cupfuls of stale breadcrumbs into a basin, pour over one pint of boiling cream, throw in a raw onion and a bay leaf and let it get cold. Take out the onion and bay leaf and work in a large piece of butter, a seasoning of white pepper, mace and salt. Mix half of this with the liver and the other half with the pounded hare meat. Place these two mixtures in alternate layers in a mould and steam them for an hour. Arrange the cutlets on a dish with one-half pound of melted butter poured over, allow them to soak, spread them out to cool, fry in butter, turn the contents of the mould out onto a dish and arrange the cutlets round, leaning them against it. Then pour around a good rich sauce made from truffles, red wine and any bones of hare not previously used, season all to taste and thicken with roux.
Two preparations in one: a steamed forcemeat loaf of liver and stewed hare, ringed with butter-basted saddle cutlets. The Waldorf kitchen had a brigade; a home cook should read it through and plan on the better part of a day.
- The hinge: keep the two farces separateThe whole point of the mould is the striped effect of alternating liver and hare layers. Pound, season and butter them in separate bowls, and divide the bread panada in half before mixing it in, or you will end up with one uniform brown loaf.
- Sourcing the hareWild hare is sold by game dealers and online butchers, often around 4 to 7 lb dressed depending on species, and often already skinned. Farmed rabbit is the common substitute but is far milder and much leaner; it will not carry the red wine and truffle sauce the way hare does. Whatever you buy, the animal must be fully drawn and the liver reserved intact, free of the greenish gall bladder.
- "Fillets with their bones attached"These are the loins cut from either side of the backbone, left on the rib and lumbar bones as small cutlets. The saddle of a hare gives perhaps eight to ten. Everything else -- forelegs, hind legs, neck, flanks -- goes into the stewpan.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup runs larger than a modern measuring cup, commonly reckoned at about 10 fluid ounces. Two cupfuls of stale crumbs are soaked in a pint of boiling cream to make the panada that binds the pounded meat.
- Mortar workA food processor does in a minute what the pestle did in twenty. Pulse the cooked meat with cold butter and seasoning rather than running it continuously, or the butter warms and the farce turns greasy.
- Stewing timeLegs and shoulders of a mature hare need 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer before the meat leaves the bone. Rabbit will be done in about 1 1/4 hours. The liver needs only a few minutes; poach it separately and briefly rather than leaving it in with the rest.
- Steaming the mouldButter a 1 1/2 to 2 quart mould, cover it tightly with foil, and set it in a covered pan of simmering water reaching halfway up. An hour is about right, but check the centre reaches 160F. Rest it ten minutes before turning out or it will slump.
- The half pound of butterThis is a soak-and-set, not a sauce: the cutlets absorb clarified butter, cool until the butter firms, then fry. Use clarified butter, since whole butter will leave milk solids that burn in the pan. The cutlets want only 2 to 3 minutes a side and should stay pink -- hare loin overcooks into dry fibre very quickly.
- The sauceEffectively a brown sauce in the espagnole manner: brown the reserved bones, deglaze with red wine, add stock, reduce, thicken with a brown roux and finish with chopped truffle. Canned truffle peelings or a good mushroom duxelles will stand in; truffle oil will not.
- YieldThe mould plus cutlets serves eight to ten as a course. Both elements are rich enough that small portions are correct.
A salmis is properly a French game preparation in which the bird or beast is partly roasted, jointed, and finished in a sauce built from its own carcass and trimmings -- the name is generally traced to salmigondis, an old word for a hotchpotch. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name went on this 1896 volume, was not a chef by trade but assembled the book from the Waldorf's working repertoire, and the entry shows the house style plainly: a classical French term applied loosely, a dish rebuilt as an elaborate mounted presentation with a moulded farce at the centre and cutlets leaning against it. Hare was still a familiar restaurant item in New York at the time, arriving from game dealers alongside venison, canvasback and grouse, and the tightening of state game laws over the following decades is much of the reason such dishes drifted off American menus. The two-toned steamed forcemeat, meanwhile, belongs to the older tradition of the pounded pate mixture bound with a bread-and-cream panada -- laborious work that a mortar made possible and a kitchen full of apprentices made practical.