No. 928

Palmettes of Hare and Young Rabbit, Polish

Palmettes de Lievre ou de Lapereau a la Polonaise

Have a mousseline forcemeat made with hare or young rabbit (No.87), adding to it truffles and mushrooms cut in eighth of an inch squares; fill the molds, poach, unmold, egg and bread-crumb, then fry them a fine color in clarified butter. Garnish with favor frills (No.10), and serve on napkins. A veloute sauce (No.415) with essence of mushrooms (No.392) to be served separately.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer writes for a kitchen with a numbered reference library at hand, so the whole method is buried in cross-references. Unpacked, this is a game mousseline: puréed hare, egg white and cream, poached in small shaped molds, then crumbed and fried.

The mousseline itselfNo. 87 is Ranhofer's mousseline forcemeat: by the standard method, raw lean game pounded and sieved, worked with egg white and seasoning, then let down with cream. Everything — bowl, meat, cream — must stay cold or the emulsion breaks and the forcemeat weeps butterfat when poached.
Poaching temperature is the hingeThe molds should sit in water held well below a simmer; boiling water curdles the egg-white-and-cream bind and the palmettes turn grainy and hollow. The recipe gives neither time nor temperature; for small molds allow roughly 15-20 minutes, until the surface is firm to a fingertip and the centre is fully set (a ground-meat forcemeat is safest taken to 160F).
Palmette moldsSmall oval or palm-leaf shaped tinned molds, now scarce. Buttered dariole molds, silicone half-oval molds or even well-buttered muffin tins give the same result; keep them shallow so the centre sets before the outside overcooks.
Clarified butter, not wholeThe milk solids in whole butter scorch long before breadcrumbs colour. The recipe specifies clarified butter; ghee serves as well. Fry only until golden — the interior is already cooked and reheating past that dries it.
Truffles and mushroomsCut in 1/8-inch dice as directed, and cook the mushrooms dry in a little butter first. Raw mushroom dice release water into the forcemeat and slacken it. Fresh truffle can be replaced with a small quantity of preserved truffle or, honestly, with more mushroom; truffle oil does not behave the same way in a poached farce.
Hare versus rabbitHare is dark, strong and dry; farmed rabbit is pale and mild. Either works, but hare needs the cream ratio at the generous end. Wild rabbit legs are sinewy — use loin and shoulder, and sieve or pass the purée to catch silverskin.
Favor frills and napkinsNo. 10 is Ranhofer's cut paper frill, purely decorative, and "serve on napkins" refers to the period convention of setting fried items on a folded linen napkin on the platter, which also takes up surplus butter. Both are optional; a warmed plate does the same job.
Sauce and yieldVelouté here is a light stock-based white sauce, chicken or game stock thickened with blond roux, infused with a mushroom essence, meaning strongly reduced mushroom cooking liquor. The recipe gives no quantities; a pound of boned meat with its cream would make perhaps a dozen small palmettes.

A Little History

Palmette names the shape, after the palm-leaf ornament, and the small molds were among the many tinned shapes a nineteenth-century professional kitchen kept in stock. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working compendium of that kitchen, and the numbered cross-references are the point — a cook was expected to own the whole system, not one dish. The "a la Polonaise" tag in French kitchen usage generally signals a finish of butter with browned crumbs, which is what the egg-and-crumb coating and clarified butter fry deliver here rather than any documented Polish original. Hare appears constantly in the book because game was still a market commodity in the 1890s; the mousseline treatment, an egg-white-and-cream emulsion associated with the refinements of late nineteenth-century French cooking, was the polite way to serve a strong, sinewy animal to diners who wanted refinement rather than a saddle on the bone.