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Stewed Rabbits with Fine Herbs
Put a few chopped mushrooms and shallots into a saucepan with a small quantity of butter, add a little minced parsley, place the saucepan over the fire and cook them until done; then put in two rabbits cut up into pieces, dust them over with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg, add a small bunch of sweet herbs, and toss the pan over the fire for a few minutes; pour in one breakfast cupful of white wine, place the lid on the pan, pile hot ashes on it, and let it remain on the fire for about twenty minutes. Add the juice of a lemon, a small lump of both butter and game glaze, sprinkle over a small quantity of flour, and stir well for two or three minutes. Turn the whole out onto a dish, piling it up, and serve.
A hearth-era braise printed in a hotel book at the moment ranges were replacing open fires — the method still assumes coals piled on the pot lid. Two things need attention: the heat source and the twenty-minute cooking time.
- Hot ashes on the lidPiling hot ashes on the cover surrounds the pan with heat from above as well as below. A covered braise in a moderate oven (around 325F) is a reasonable modern stand-in, rather than a pan sitting on a burner.
- Twenty minutes is optimisticThat figure suits a very young farmed rabbit cut small. A supermarket rabbit generally wants 35-45 minutes covered; anything wild or over a year old needs 1.5 hours or more before the hind legs give way. Cook to tenderness, not to the clock.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup in period usage runs 8-10 fluid ounces. Treat it as a generous cup of dry white wine; with two rabbits in the pan you may want a little stock as well to keep the pieces part-submerged.
- Game glazeGlace de gibier — game stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A spoonful of commercial demi-glace or a very reduced brown chicken stock stands in; a stock cube does not, being mostly salt.
- The mushroom and shallot baseThis is a duxelles in all but name. Cook it until the mushroom liquid has gone and the mixture begins to fry, or it will water down the sauce.
- Sweet herbsA bundle of thyme, parsley stalks and bay, tied so it can be pulled out. "Sweet" here means fragrant rather than sugary.
- The flour at the endSprinkling dry flour over a finished braise is the hinge that most often goes wrong — it lumps and tastes raw. Mash the flour into the butter first and stir the paste in off the boil, then simmer two or three minutes to cook it out.
- YieldTwo rabbits should serve four to six. The recipe asks for the whole to be turned out onto a dish and piled up.
Oscar Tschirky was never a cook — he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and the 1896 book that carries his name is generally understood to be a compilation rather than his own writing, drawing on the hotel's repertoire and on earlier printed sources. Rabbit sat comfortably on that repertoire: cheap enough to be everyday food in rural America, and respectable enough in a French kitchen, where aux fines herbes could signal a parsley-shallot-mushroom treatment rather than any fixed list of leaves. The instruction to pile hot ashes on the lid points to an older hearth-cookery ancestry: by the 1890s a hotel of the Waldorf's size ran on coal ranges, so the phrasing reads as an inherited formula rather than a description of the kitchen's own practice — though that is inference from the wording, not something the book states.