No. 2148

Gibelotte of Young Rabbits, Parmentier

Gibelotte de Lapereaux Parmentier

After disjointing two young rabbits, wash them in plenty of cold water to extract all the blood, wipe on a cloth drying them at the same time, then fry in butter to stiffen; add two tablespoonfuls of flour, salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, and half a clove of crushed garlic; moisten with half a bottleful of white wine, and some stock (No. 194a), keeping the sauce rather thick, now throw in a garnished bunch of parsley (No. 123), and some mushroom parings. Let cook for three-quarters of an hour, skim the fat from the top, drain off the pieces of rabbit, and pare each one, then put them aside in a saucepan to keep hot with a few spoonfuls of the sauce. Now reduce the remainder of it to resemble a thick veloute sauce (No. 415), and thicken it with a liaison of four egg-yolks; strain it through a tammy, and place it in a bain-marie. When prepared to serve, dish up the pieces of rabbit, and garnish around with olive-shaped potatoes cooked in stock (No. 194a) and a pound of cooked mushrooms; add to the sauce kept warm, a heavy pinch of chopped parsley, and two shallots blanched and chopped; also two spoonfuls of olive oil and the juice of a lemon; pour it over the rabbit.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock, velouté and bouquet garni already standing by, and he cross-references rather than repeats. Everything the recipe assumes you have is straightforward to supply.

The hinge: the egg-yolk liaisonOnce the four yolks go in, the sauce must not boil or it will scramble and break. Temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot reduced sauce, return it off the heat, and bring it only to the point where it coats a spoon — around 180F. The bain-marie he calls for is holding insurance, not a cooking step.
The cross-referencesNo. 194a is a plain white stock; a good unsalted chicken stock stands in exactly. No. 123 is a bouquet garni — parsley stems, thyme, bay tied in leek or tied with string. No. 415 is velouté, cited here only as a thickness description: the reduced sauce should coat the back of a spoon.
"Fry in butter to stiffen"This is raidir: firming the flesh and setting the surface without taking colour. Keep the heat moderate and stop before browning — this version, finished with white wine and a yolk liaison, is meant to stay pale, and browned rabbit turns the finished sauce muddy.
Half a bottleful of wineA nineteenth-century wine bottle was near enough today's 750 ml, so this is about 1½ cups of dry white. Add it before the stock and let it reduce by half to cook off the raw edge, since the flour has already gone in.
Rabbit size and timingTwo young rabbits means two fryers of roughly 2½ lb each, serving six. Forty-five minutes suits young animals; a mature rabbit or anything sold as "stewing" will want closer to 1¼ hours and will still be firmer.
Mushroom parings and the pound of mushroomsThe parings are the trimmings and peelings thrown into the braise purely for flavour and strained out. The pound of cooked mushrooms for garnish is a separate operation — button mushrooms stewed in butter with a squeeze of lemon, kept pale.
Olive-shaped potatoesTourné potatoes, cut to seven facets about the size of a large olive, simmered in stock rather than water so they season through. Use a waxy variety; a floury potato will collapse before it is cooked.
"Pare each one" and the tammyParing means tidying the cooked pieces — trimming ragged edges, pulling loose bone and skin so the plate looks clean. A tammy is a fine cloth sieve; a chinois lined with muslin does the same work.
The finishParsley, blanched shallot, olive oil and lemon juice go in at the last moment, off the heat. They are there for lift and gloss, and reheating afterwards will dull the parsley and risk the yolks.

A Little History

Gibelotte is the standard French name for a white fricassée of rabbit in wine, usually distinguished from civet, which is dark and finished with blood; the word is generally traced to the Old French gibelet, a dish of small game birds, and by the nineteenth century it belonged firmly to rabbit and to the riverside guinguettes around Paris. The tag Parmentier signals potatoes, after Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the pharmacist and agronomist who campaigned to establish the potato as human food in late eighteenth-century France; in classical kitchen shorthand his name on a dish means potato in some form, here turned to olives and cooked in stock. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, published The Epicurean in 1894 with a chapter on rabbit, hare and squirrel substantial enough to hold several gibelottes side by side.