No. 2147

Gibelotte of Rabbits

Bibelots de Lapis

Cut clean fine tame rabbits in pieces, put them into a vessel to season and marinate for a couple of hours with onions, parsley, and vinegar. Melt some chopped up fat pork in a pan; add to it a quarter of a pound of cut up bacon, fry and drain this off. Put the rabbit meats into the same pan and fry over a good fire, bestrew with a spoonful of flour, and moisten to their height with one-third of white wine, and two-thirds of stock (No. 194a); boil up the liquid, then transfer the stew into a saucepan to let cook slowly until partly done; strain the sauce, pare the meats and return them to the same saucepan with the bacon, a clove of garlic, a garnished bunch of parsley, and two dozen small onions browned in a pan; continue to boil all together. At the expiration of a quarter of an hour, put in fifteen to twenty fresh mushrooms, and seven or eight minutes later, dress the meats on a dish with the garnishings around, if there be too much sauce, reduce it; strain it over the stew, and surround with plain bread-crusts cut into triangles, and browned in butter.

← No. 2146 Fillets of Young Rabbits with Artichoke or M Rabbit, Hare & Squirrel No. 2148 Gibelotte of Young Rabbits, Parmentier →

For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward white-wine rabbit stew, but Ranhofer writes in professional shorthand and leans on cross-references to his own stock chapter. A few translations make it workable at home.

The garbled heading"Bibelots de Lapis" is an OCR misreading of Gibelotte de Lapins. Nothing is missing from the method itself.
Stock No. 194 aRanhofer's reference is to a numbered stock recipe elsewhere in his own book. Any unsalted chicken or veal stock works; the sauce is finished by reduction, so a salted commercial stock will end up harsh.
"Moisten to their height"Add liquid until it just comes level with the meat, no deeper. The recipe specifies the proportions only, one-third white wine to two-thirds stock; the total depends on the size of your pan and the amount of rabbit.
Fat pork and bacon"Chopped up fat pork" is unsmoked salt pork or fresh pork fatback, used only to render cooking fat. The quarter pound of cut-up bacon is lardons, fried and drained, then returned to the stew later so it does not fall apart.
Tame rabbit and timing"Tame" means a farmed rabbit rather than a wild one. A modern farmed rabbit will cook in roughly 35 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer; wild rabbit or hare needs considerably longer and a lower heat. The forelegs and saddle finish well before the hind legs, so pull pieces as they are done rather than cooking to a single clock time.
The hinge: two stages of liquidThe point of straining the sauce and "paring the meats" partway through is to remove the flour scum and any bone splinters before the garnish goes in. Skip it and the finished dish is cloudy and the onions cook to mush while the rabbit catches up.
Mushrooms and onionsThe two dozen small onions are browned separately so they hold shape; they go in a quarter of an hour before the mushrooms and so cook for a little over twenty minutes in all. The mushrooms go in for the last seven or eight minutes only.
YieldThe recipe calls for rabbits, plural, and the garnish quantities suit a dish for four to six. The triangular fried bread-crusts are called for in butter, as the recipe specifies.

A Little History

Gibelotte is an old French country term for a fricassee of rabbit in wine, generally traced to the same root as gibier, game, and it is often described as a rabbit stew with white wine, bacon, onions and mushrooms, the pale cousin of civet, which is red wine and thickened with blood. It was cheap, rural food that Parisian restaurants adopted and dressed up, and Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, keeps the peasant structure while imposing kitchen-brigade discipline on it: the stock is a numbered recipe, the sauce is strained, the garnish is cooked separately and arranged around the meat. The instruction to use "tame" rabbits is a practical note from a period when both farmed and wild rabbit reached the market and the two behaved very differently in the pan. The vinegar-and-onion marinade is sometimes said to be a holdover from the tenderizing and flavor-masking of older animals, though that is a matter of conjecture.