No. 3596

Rabbit in Surprise

Lapin en Surprise

Rabbit or any other animal in surprise, made of spun sugar and serving for covering ices (Fig. 722). For the rabbit or hare make the ice in a half melon-shaped mold; the bear and rabbit in an iced biscuit mold (Fig. 626). These molds can be filled with puddings, parfaits, etc., either with flavors or with fruits; pack in ice, freeze for one hour for each quart, unmold and dress; lay on top either a rabbit, hare or bear of spun sugar and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is less a recipe than a set of assembly notes from a chef who assumed his reader already knew how to spin sugar and pack a mold. The dish is a frozen bombe or parfait unmolded and crowned with a sugar-work animal.

The hinge: spun sugar and moistureSpun sugar is sugar cooked to hard crack, around 300-310F, then flicked into threads and shaped over an oiled form. It collapses in humid air and dissolves on contact with anything wet, so the animal goes on at the last possible moment, never onto a weeping or frosted surface, and the finished piece cannot wait in the refrigerator.
"Freeze for one hour for each quart"This assumes a mold buried in a tub of cracked ice and coarse salt, where the freezing is fast and even. A home freezer at 0F is slower; a quart bombe will want four to six hours, or overnight, and should be tempered a few minutes at room temperature before unmolding.
Packing in iceIf you want the original method, use roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, packed tight around a sealed mold, with the joint of the mold sealed in butter or lard so brine cannot seep in. Drain and repack as the ice melts.
Iced biscuit moldA biscuit glacé mold is generally the rectangular, brick-shaped hinged mold used for layered frozen mousses. Any hinged metal bombe mold or a metal loaf pan lined with plastic film will serve; for the half melon-shaped mold called for here, a ribbed oval or, failing that, a domed metal bowl will approximate the shape.
Parfait, in the period senseRanhofer's parfait is a still-frozen mixture of egg yolks cooked with syrup, then folded with whipped cream. It contains enough fat and sugar to freeze smooth without churning, which is why the recipe never mentions a machine.
UnmoldingDip the sealed mold briefly in cold water, not hot, and invert onto a chilled serving dish. Hot water melts the surface and can spoil the shape and finish.
YieldA quart mold serves six to eight as dessert. If you are making the sugar animal, count on the sugar work taking longer than the ice.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and entries like this one belong to the section of the book that is really about display rather than flavor. The pièce montée tradition of edible architecture is generally traced to Antonin Carême in early nineteenth-century Paris, and by Ranhofer's day an American banquet of any pretension expected the ices to arrive dressed as swans, baskets, temples or, here, a rabbit spun from sugar and perched on a melon-shaped dome. The terse phrasing is characteristic: the book was written for professional kitchens where the difficult parts, sugar cooked to the crack and molds packed in ice and salt, were daily work and needed no explanation. What it tells you about the period is that a dessert was judged as much on its silhouette across the dining room as on its taste, and that the labor to achieve it was cheap and abundant.