No. 315

Hunters' Style Soup

Potage a la Chasseur

Roast three partridges and one young wild rabbit, all barded with slices of fat pork; when done, remove the fillets from the partridges as well as from the rabbit, doing this very carefully. Put the rest, meat and bones, into a saucepan or stock pot, with a fowl split into pieces, and two pounds of small, half inch squares of beef. Moisten with four quarts of beef stock (No. 194a), let it boil, then skim and add some carrots, turnips, onions and two cloves; cook slowly for two hours, salt properly, then cut into squares the fillets taken from the partridges and rabbit. Have some small, round rolls, and inch and a quarter in diameter; after completely emptying them with a knife, fill the insides with a delicate young rabbit godiveau (No. 84), mixing in with it some chopped up mushrooms and truffles. Lay the rolls on a buttered pan, one beside the other, besprinkle them over with butter or broth, and dredge some grated parmesan cheese on top; set them in a slack oven for fifteen minutes, then lay them in a vegetable dish; strain the rest of the broth through a napkin, clarify it and boil it up again, thickening with a spoonful of tapioca for each quart and adding half a gill of Madeira wine.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A full-dress game consommé from Ranhofer's Delmonico kitchen: two separate operations, a clear game broth and a tray of stuffed cheese-topped rolls served alongside. Read it as a project rather than a weeknight soup.

The hinge: the fillets are not stock meatThe breasts of the partridges and the saddle of the rabbit come off after roasting and go into the finished soup as a garnish. Everything else — carcasses, legs, the whole fowl, the diced beef — is there to make broth, and will be strained out and discarded.
BardingWrapping the birds and rabbit in sheets of fat pork before roasting. Use thin-sliced fatback or unsmoked streaky bacon tied on with kitchen twine; game this lean will dry out in an uncovered oven without it. Ranhofer gives no roasting temperature; a hot oven of about 425F suits small game, and roast only until the breasts are just firm, since they get a second life in hot soup.
Slack ovenA cool oven, conventionally reckoned somewhere in the 250-300F range. Fifteen minutes at that heat sets the forcemeat in the rolls and colours the parmesan lightly without collapsing the bread shells.
GodiveauRanhofer's No. 84 is a fine forcemeat — meat pounded with suet or fat and bound with egg, essentially a quenelle mixture. A modern substitute is ground rabbit or chicken thigh worked in a food processor with an egg white and a little cream until smooth, seasoned, with the chopped mushrooms and truffle folded in.
Half a gill of MadeiraA gill is half a cup, so this is a scant quarter cup for the whole four quarts. Add it off the boil at the end; it is there for aroma, and simmering will drive it off.
ClarifyingStraining through a napkin means a doubled cloth or fine muslin. Ranhofer's clarification is the classic raft of lean minced meat and egg white whisked into the cold broth, brought slowly to a bare tremble and left alone — the soup is meant to be transparent, so any hard boil after this point undoes the work.
TapiocaA spoonful per quart of small pearl tapioca, not instant or flour, added to the simmering clear broth for roughly fifteen minutes until the pearls turn translucent. It gives body and a faint gloss rather than a thick soup.
Sourcing the gameFarmed partridge and rabbit are sold by game dealers and online butchers; a pair of quail or a poussin will stand in for partridge, and the "fowl" is a stewing hen, best replaced with a 4–5 lb chicken or a pound of chicken wings and backs.
YieldFour quarts of stock will lose some volume in reduction and clarification, leaving perhaps three, or roughly twelve to sixteen consomme servings; this was written for restaurant service. The recipe does not say how many rolls to allow per person.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working system set down in print, complete with the cross-references to numbered preparations that make individual recipes read like entries in a manual. Potage à la chasseur — hunter's soup — belongs to a family of French garnished consommés named for the supposed source of their materials, and the name here is honest enough: partridge, wild rabbit and Madeira were what an autumn game larder produced. The stuffed and gratinéed rolls are a version of what French kitchens are often said to have called croûtes or petits pains farcis, and they are served on a separate dish. The fastidiousness of the thing — roast the game, then take it apart, then rebuild the broth from the wreckage, then clarify it until it reads like glass — is the whole argument of the book: at Delmonico's, a bowl of soup was worth three birds and half a day.