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Timbales of Hare
Trim off all the skin of some cold cooked hare, chop the flesh, place it in a mortar and pound till smooth; mix it with one-third of its quantity of grated bread crumbs, a little finely-chopped parsley and pepper and salt to taste. Whisk the whites of two eggs to a stiff froth, stir them in with the mixture and add a few drops of clear gravy to bring all to a proper consistence. Butter some small timbale moulds, fill them with the mixture, place them in a stewpan with boiling water to three-fourths of their heights, and steam for about half an hour. Warm a little rich gravy and mix it with one tablespoonful of claret. When ready turn the timbales out onto a hot dish, pour round the gravy, and serve.
A forcemeat recipe written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no quantities for the main ingredient, no oven, and an assumption that a pot of good brown gravy is already on the stove. The proportions are given by ratio, which makes it easy to scale to whatever meat you have.
- Hare and substitutesEuropean brown hare is sold by some game dealers, but jackrabbit and domestic rabbit are far easier to find; farmed rabbit is milder and leaner, so the mixture will want a little more fat. The recipe calls for "cold cooked" hare without saying how it was cooked, so this is a dish for leftovers rather than a starting point.
- The ratioMeat to breadcrumbs is 3:1 by volume, with two egg whites. Roughly 1 1/2 cups packed chopped meat to 1/2 cup fresh crumbs makes about four small timbales.
- Mortar and poundingA food processor does this in thirty seconds, but pulse rather than run it continuously — hare is lean and over-processing turns the forcemeat pasty. Pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the smooth texture Oscar's kitchen would have produced.
- "Clear gravy"Not thickened pan gravy but a clear, well-reduced brown stock, ideally made from the hare bones. It goes in a few drops at a time; the mixture should hold a soft shape on a spoon, not slump.
- Timbale mouldsSmall dariole or timbale moulds hold about 4 fl oz. Buttered 4-ounce ramekins or a muffin tin work; butter them heavily and line the base with a disc of parchment, since a lean forcemeat sticks.
- The water bath"Boiling water to three-fourths of their heights" is a bain-marie on the stovetop, covered. Keep the water at a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil — hard boiling makes the egg white set coarsely and the timbales weep. Half an hour is right for 4-ounce moulds; they are done at 160-165F in the centre and should feel just firm.
- The claret sauceClaret here means dry red Bordeaux or any dry, unoaked red. One tablespoon to a cup or so of hot gravy is a seasoning, not a reduction — add it off the heat so the wine keeps its edge.
- ServingFour moulds serve two as a main course with the meat already cooked into them, or four as a first course. Unmould onto a warmed dish and sauce around the base, not over the top.
Timbales — from the French for a kettledrum, after the shape of the mould — were a fixture of hotel and club cookery on both sides of the Atlantic when Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s and 1900s. They were a way of making something elegant and portion-controlled out of meat that had already been cooked once, which mattered a great deal in a kitchen serving hundreds of covers from a single day's butchery. Hare belonged to the game repertoire that a grand American hotel imported wholesale from French practice: strong, dark, faintly livery meat, traditionally paired with red wine and served in small quantities. The claret in the sauce is doing the same work as the wine in a jugged hare, cutting the richness of the game. Wild hare and rabbit were still common market goods in American cities at the turn of the century; their near-disappearance from ordinary retail is one of the sharpest breaks between this book's larder and a modern one.