No. 2389

Timbale of Young Hare

Timbale de Levraut

Bone a young hare, cut it up into sixteen pieces, and put these into a saucepan with melted fat pork, two tablespoonfuls of chopped onions and half a pound of bacon cut in half-inch squares and blanched. Fry these meats over a good fire, season with salt and spices, and when well stiffened throw in a pound of medium-sized mushrooms turned and channeled (No. 118), also a glassful of white wine; cover the saucepan, reduce the liquid quickly and leave till cold. Butter a plain timbale mold six inches in diameter by six inches high, strew the bottom with a handful of freshly and finely cut-up noodle paste (No. 142), or else pretty pieces cut out with a column tube; apply them all over the inside surface, wetting lightly with water, then line the mold with foundation paste (No. 135), having it rolled out very thin; now cover the bottom and sides with a thin layer of chopped game forcemeat (No. 67). Fill the timbale with the hare and some game quenelles (No. 733) intermingled; cover with a layer of the same forcemeat and over this a round flat of the paste, attaching it to the lower one at the edge. Place the timbale on a small baking sheet and push it into a moderate oven to cook for one hour and a quarter; after removing from the oven, invert it on a dish, make a hole in the center and pour into the inside a brown sauce (No. 414) reduced with Madeira and game fumet (No. 397) made with the hare parings and the mushroom peelings, then strained through a tammy.

← No. 2388 Timbale of Sweetbreads, Modern-Large Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2390 Tourte of Palate of Beef, Parisian Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a stockpot always going, and this entry leans on five other numbered recipes. Read it as an assembly diagram: the filling is a quick game stew, the shell is a lined pastry drum, and everything can be staged over two days.

Levraut means leveretA hare in its first year, and genuinely hard to buy in the United States. Farmed rabbit is the usual stand-in; it is leaner and milder, so the Madeira and game fumet carry more of the flavour than they would with hare.
Melted fat porkThis is rendered salt pork fat, essentially lard with a cured edge. Lard or a mix of lard and butter does the job. The half pound of bacon is blanched first to draw out salt and smoke, which is worth doing with modern bacon too.
A glassful of white wineAlmost certainly a wineglass measure, which in period usage runs from about 2 fl oz up to a small tumbler, so 1/4 to 1/2 cup is defensible. The braise is then reduced hard and cooled completely before it goes into the pastry, which matters: warm filling melts the butter out of the lining.
Turned and channeled mushroomsNo. 118 is the classic fluting of a mushroom cap with a paring knife, purely decorative here since the mushrooms are buried. Whole small button mushrooms, sauteed, are functionally identical.
The pastesFoundation paste (No. 135) is a firm short crust made to line moulds and hold their shape; noodle paste (No. 142) is an egg pasta dough, cut into small shapes and pressed against the buttered mould so it prints a pattern on the outside when the timbale is unmoulded. Skip the noodle work if you like; the timbale is sound without it.
Forcemeat and quenellesNo. 67 is the chopped game forcemeat and No. 733 the game quenelles; consult those numbers for their exact composition, as the two mixtures need not be the same. Both serve to fill the gaps so the timbale slices cleanly instead of collapsing. A plain pork-and-game farce made in a food processor works.
A moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. An hour and a quarter in a six-inch-deep mould is realistic for a pastry case this thick; check that the centre of the forcemeat reaches 160F before unmoulding.
Fumet and tammyThe sauce is a brown sauce reduced with Madeira and a stock made from the hare bones, trimmings and mushroom peelings. A tammy is a fine cloth sieve; a chinois lined with muslin is the modern equivalent. Pour it in hot through a hole cut in the top just before serving.
YieldNo yield is given; a six-by-six-inch timbale would plausibly serve around eight as an entree course, more if it is one of several dishes.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some three decades running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how completely that kitchen operated in French. Timbale is the mould itself, a straight-sided drum; the word comes into French as the name of a kettledrum, and by the nineteenth century it named anything baked in such a mould. Levraut is a young hare, a game animal that carried real prestige on a New York menu because it had to come from a dealer rather than a farm. The cross-referenced numbers are the point of the book's design: Ranhofer assumed a cook would already have foundation paste, game forcemeat, brown sauce and quenelle mixture standing by, so an elaborate dish reduces on paper to a page of assembly. Hare and rabbit pies of this general shape are much older than Delmonico's and are found across French and English cookery; what marks this one as its period is the decorative noodle-paste lining, the game fumet drawn from parings and peelings, and the assumption that eight people will eat it as merely one of several entrees.