No. 2079

Young Hares' Fillets with Currant Jelly and Raisin Sauce

Filets de Levrauts a la Sauce de Gelee de Groseilles et aux Raisins

Pare and suppress the nerves from the fillets and minion fillets of two young hares; cut the larger ones on the bias to obtain two or three slices, flatten, pare into half hearts, season and put them in a buttered sautoir sprinkle over with butter. With the bones and fragments make a fumet (No. 397) and moisten it with skimmed broth (No. 194a), and when ready pass this through a sieve and pour it into a saucepan with a gill of vinegar, then reduce the liquid to a half-glaze, stir in some currant jelly, a piece of lemon peel and a handful of well-washed dry raisins softened in hot water. Push the fillets into a brisk oven and as soon as cooked add them to the sauce; dress, pass the sauce through a tammy and pour part of it over the meats, serving the rest in a sauce-boat.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer assumes a brigade and a shelf of numbered base preparations, but the dish itself is straightforward: lean saddle fillets roasted hot and fast, finished in a sweet-sour game sauce. Almost everything that can go wrong is a matter of overcooking.

The hinge: do not cook the fillets throughThe hinge: do not overcook the fillets -- Hare loin is very lean and turns dry and livery if taken far past medium-rare. Give the pared fillets a few minutes only in a hot oven, then rest them while you finish the sauce. "As soon as cooked" in the original means barely so. Cooks who want wild hare rare (around 130-135F internal) should be aware this is below the temperature recommended for wild game; see the caution.
LevrautA levraut is a young hare, a hare of the year, commonly around 4-6 lb. Two of them yield a modest amount of trimmed loin. Order from a game dealer; farmed rabbit loin substitutes but is paler and milder, so watch the cooking closely.
Pare and suppress the nervesThis means stripping the silvery membrane from the loins with a thin blade, the way you would trim a beef tenderloin. Left on, it contracts in the oven and curls the slices. The minion fillets are the two small strips lying beneath the saddle.
A gill of vinegarA gill is half a cup, which is a great deal of vinegar for a sauce this size. Ranhofer expects it to be reduced hard with the fumet to a half-glaze, and then buffered by currant jelly. Add it in stages and taste as you reduce rather than committing all four ounces at once.
Fumet and skimmed brothNo. 397 is Ranhofer's fumet, made from bones and trimmings as the recipe directs; No. 194a is a broth, here used skimmed, i.e. defatted. A good unsalted brown chicken or veal stock, reinforced with the roasted hare bones, gets you to much the same place. Keep it unsalted, since it is going to be reduced to a glaze.
Half-glazeReduce until the liquid coats a spoon and leaves a clean trail; judge it by consistency rather than by a fixed fraction of the starting volume. Salt only after this point.
Sautoir and tammyA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan; any ovenproof skillet serves. A tammy is a fine woollen straining cloth, wrung to force the sauce through. A chinois lined with muslin does the job, though strain before adding the raisins back or you will lose them.
Brisk ovenRanhofer gives no temperatures; a brisk oven is usually read as somewhere around 425-450F. The pan should be preheated so the buttered fillets take colour immediately.
YieldTwo young hares give enough trimmed and sliced fillet for four to six as a course, no more. The sauce is rich and served partly at table in a boat.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the vast compendium of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where a Gilded Age menu was expected to run to several game courses in season. Currant jelly is a standard component of classic French game sauces, and the treatment here is dressed in French technique: a classic French treatment would lean on a poivrade or sauce Grand Veneur, and what appears here is essentially that idea reworked into an aigre-doux of vinegar, jelly and plumped raisins. Sweet-sour sauces for dark game meat are old, and are often traced back through medieval European cookery, where vinegar, dried fruit and spice are said to have been the standard foil for strong flesh; by Ranhofer's day the logic survived mostly in game cookery, long after it had left the rest of the meat repertoire. The numbered cross-references to fumet and broth are typical of the book, which was written for professional kitchens that already had those preparations standing on the stove.