No. 2303

Young Rabbit Hash Garnished with Croquettes

Hachis de Lapereaux Garni de Croquettes

Trim nicely the meats of one or several cold roasted young rabbits, cut them up into quarterinch squares. Reduce some espagnole sauce (No. 414) in a sautoir, either with champagne or good white wine, to the consistency of half-glaze, add to it the meats and season well; heat it up without boiling in a bain-marie for one hour, dish up the hash and surround it with small round and flat young rabbit croquettes, made with cold rabbit free of bones, sinews or fat, and cut up into three-sixteenths inch squares, with the same of truffles and mushrooms; mix all these together with espagnole sauce (No. 414), finished with rabbit fumet. Fry, wipe, salt and dress them around the hash, scattering chopped parsley over the whole.

← No. 2302 Hashed Woodcock in a Croustade with Soft Egg Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2304 "pain" of Chicken a la Villars →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Gilded Age use-up dish: yesterday's roast rabbit reheated in a reduced brown sauce and ringed with croquettes of the same meat. Ranhofer assumes you already keep espagnole and a rabbit fumet on hand, so most of the modern work is in the sauce, not the hash.

Never let it boilThe hash is warmed in a bain-marie for an hour precisely so the already-cooked rabbit does not seize and go stringy. Keep the water bath at a bare shiver, around 180F, and keep the hash itself above 140F for holding. If it simmers, the meat dries and the sauce breaks.
Espagnole No. 414The reference is to Ranhofer's brown mother sauce: a brown roux with meat stock and aromatics, simmered and skimmed for hours (period versions vary in whether tomato is included). A good reduced brown stock thickened lightly, or a modern demi-glace let down with stock, stands in without embarrassment. Reducing it with champagne or dry white wine to "half-glaze" means it should nap a spoon and leave a clean trail.
Rabbit fumetA concentrated stock made from the rabbit bones and trimmings, browned and reduced hard. Roast the carcass, simmer with aromatics, then reduce to a few spoonfuls; it is what makes the croquette filling taste of rabbit rather than of sauce.
LapereauA young rabbit, under about three months and roughly 2 to 3 lb dressed. Farmed rabbit sold today is generally this age and works directly. Older or wild rabbit is tougher and darker and wants braising rather than roasting.
The diceQuarter-inch for the hash, three-sixteenths for the croquette filling, with truffle and mushroom cut to match. The smaller cut is not fussiness: croquettes bound with sauce hold their shape only if no single piece is large enough to work loose when the crust sets.
What the croquette method leaves outRanhofer takes the standard procedure as read. The filling must be bound with enough reduced espagnole to be stiff, spread on a tray, chilled thoroughly, then shaped, breaded (flour, egg, fine crumbs) and fried. Warm or loosely bound filling bursts in the fat.
FryingDeep fat at 350 to 375F, a minute or two to a deep gold. "Fry, wipe, salt" means drain and blot at once, salt while hot, and dress immediately; croquettes held any length of time go soft.
Yield and serviceA dressed young rabbit yields on the order of a pound of picked meat, which will serve about four as an entree once part is diverted to the croquettes; the recipe itself calls for "one or several" rabbits and gives no count. Two rabbits make a proper platter. Serve the moment the croquettes are dressed, with the chopped parsley scattered last.

A Little History

Hachis is simply French for hash, and in the nineteenth-century professional kitchen it carried none of the diner connotation it has now. A dish like this one suggests how a great house handled its cold roast meat: birds and rabbits were roasted whole for the first service, and the leftover, rather than reappearing in some plainer form, seems to have been diced fine, bound in a wine-reduced espagnole and given a border of croquettes made from the same animal. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York across two separate stints, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete working reference, which is why this entry cross-references sauce and fumet by number rather than repeating them. Rabbit was then an ordinary market meat in American cities, cheaper than chicken and sold by butchers and game dealers alike; its near-disappearance from mainstream American menus over the twentieth century is generally traced to the rise of cheap industrial poultry rather than to any change in taste. The rule that the hash is heated "without boiling" is the whole technique in miniature: reheating cooked meat gently in sauce is how a restaurant kitchen made a second-day dish taste deliberate.