No. 2274

Cutlets of Young Hare a la Favorite

Cotelettes de Levraut a la Favorite

Take both fillet and minion fillets, suppress the sinews and cut the meat lengthwise in two or three pieces; flatten and pare into half hearts, salt and lay them on a buttered baking sheet; bend them all to the right and give them the shape of a cutlet. Cut each minion fillet in three equal pieces, streak them on their length with truffles and place on the outside edge of the cutlets, cover over with bards of fat pork or else melted butter and cook in a brisk oven; drain and decorate with fancy favor frills (No. 10). Lay these cutlets on bread-crumb croutons cut the same size, dressing them in a circle, and fill the center with a stew composed of quenelles made with the leg and shoulder meats, truffles, mushrooms and espagnole sauce (No. 414), well reduced and beaten with some fumet (No. 397) made of the hare's carcasses and bones; serve more of this sauce apart at the same time.

← No. 2273 Veal Cutlets, Pogarski Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2275 Young Rabbit Cutlets a la Previllot →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock pots already going, so the recipe assumes espagnole, a game fumet and quenelle forcemeat are on hand. Read it as an assembly plan: loins shaped into mock cutlets, a garnish stew of the tougher meat, and one sauce doing double duty.

The hinge: do not overcook the loinHare loin is lean, dark and dries out fast; the fat barding is there precisely because there is no internal fat. In a hot oven the shaped pieces need only a few minutes to reach medium-rare, and they should rest before plating. Cooked through, they turn liverish and dry, and the whole dish collapses.
"Minion fillets"These are the filets mignons, the two small strips of tenderloin lying against the underside of the saddle, not the large loin muscles. Ranhofer uses the big fillets for the cutlet bodies and cuts the small ones into three to sit on the outer edge as a decorative crest.
Brisk ovenRanhofer never gives temperatures; in a modern oven this is roughly 425-450F. The point is a quick sear and set rather than roasting; the barding fat should crisp and colour rather than render slowly.
Bards of fat porkThin sheets of unsmoked back fat, sold as fatback at a good butcher. Caul fat wrapped around each cutlet does the same job and self-bastes. Unsmoked streaky bacon works but adds cure flavour the original does not want; the alternative Ranhofer gives, plain melted butter, is the simplest route.
Streaking with trufflesCut peeled truffle into fine batons and thread them through the meat with a larding needle, or make shallow incisions and inset them. Fresh black truffle is the intent; preserved truffle in the tin is a reasonable substitute and its juice belongs in the sauce.
Favor frillsHis No. 10 is the paper cutlet frill, the same white ruffle traditionally slipped over a lamb chop bone. Purely ornamental here, since these cutlets have no bone; skip them without loss.
Espagnole and fumetEspagnole is the brown mother sauce built on brown stock and roux. The fumet here is not a fish stock but a concentrated brown game essence made by roasting and simmering the hare's bones and carcass, then reducing hard. A well-reduced brown game jus finished with a knob of butter gives the same effect in a domestic kitchen.
The centre stewQuenelles are poached forcemeat dumplings; grind the leg and shoulder meat, which is too sinewy for the cutlets, with egg white and cream, then poach small spoonfuls in barely trembling stock. Bound with the reduced sauce, truffle and mushroom, they fill the ring of cutlets.
Sourcing and yieldWild hare is not stocked in American supermarkets; order imported European hare or farmed rabbit from a game supplier, and expect a young hare to yield only two or three portions of loin. Rabbit loin behaves the same way but is paler and milder, which is exactly what Ranhofer treats separately in No. 2275.
CroutonsRounds or half-hearts of crustless bread cut to match the cutlets and fried in clarified butter until golden. Cut and fry them before the meat goes into the oven; they hold, and the cutlets do not.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he wrote after some thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and the numbered cross-references to sauces, garnishes and frills are the book's whole method: it is a professional's reference, not a home cookbook. Levraut is a young hare, a leveret, and the classical kitchen prized it for tenderness while consigning older hares to civet and long braises. The trick of paring a boneless fillet into a heart shape and calling it a cutlet is pure nineteenth-century service cooking, where uniform, dressed-up portions mattered as much as flavour; the paper frill on a boneless piece of meat gives the game away. Garnishes styled a la favorite appear across French menus of the period with no fixed formula, generally signalling truffle and a refined garnish rather than any one preparation. That a New York restaurant could put young hare on the card at all reflects a market then still supplied by wild game dealers, a trade largely legislated out of existence in the United States in the decades after this book appeared.