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October 30
Menu: Brussel Sprout Soup; Rabbit, a la Marengo; Parisian Potatoes Braised Celery; Lettuce, French Dressing; Prune and Rice Meringues; Coffee Rabbit, a la Marengo-Cut up 1 rabbit into neat joints. Melt ½ cup Crisco in saucepan, put in rabbit and fry it quickly till browned, add 2 chopped small onions, and fry for a few minutes, pour off any fat into another pan, add to rabbit 1 cup brown sauce, 2 chopped tomatoes, 8 button mushrooms, seasoning of salt, pepper, and paprika. Put on lid and simmer gently 1 hour. Arrange rabbit on hot dish, put mushrooms in heaps round with thin lemon slices, season gravy and pour it over. Halloween
A straightforward braise dressed up with a Napoleonic name. The only unfamiliar parts for a modern cook are the fat, the sauce that is assumed rather than given, and the fact that rabbit today behaves differently than the rabbit this book expected.
- Crisco and the half cup½ cup is 4 oz of solid vegetable shortening, and it is there purely as a frying medium in a book written to sell it. Any neutral fat with a decent smoke point does the same job; butter and oil together will brown the joints and add flavour the shortening cannot.
- Brown sauce is not optionalThe cup of brown sauce is assumed rather than given; in a book of this date it would most likely be a flour-and-fat roux browned and slackened with beef or veal stock, in the manner of a simplified espagnole. Substituting a well-reduced beef stock thickened with a little beurre manié gives the same body; plain stock will leave you with thin, watery gravy.
- Pouring off the fatThe instruction to tip the fat into another pan before the liquid goes in is the step that decides whether the finished sauce is glossy or greasy. Do it thoroughly, leaving the browned residue in the pan.
- Rabbit size and timingA dressed rabbit runs about 2½–3 lb and gives six to eight joints. Farmed rabbit is tender and will be done in 45 minutes to an hour; a wild rabbit is leaner and older and may want 1½ hours before the leg meat gives way.
- Cooking throughRabbit is a white meat that dries out fast. Take it to 160°F at the thickest part of the hind leg and no further — the aim is meat that just releases from the bone, not shreds.
- Button mushrooms"Button" meant small immature caps left whole, not sliced. Eight is modest for a whole rabbit if you want heaps round the dish, so you may prefer more, and they hold their shape better added in the last 20 minutes.
- YieldOne rabbit serves four, with rice, noodles or plain boiled potatoes to take the sauce.
The Marengo name is generally traced to the battle fought in Piedmont in June 1800, and the often-repeated story that Napoleon's cook improvised a chicken dish from what he could scavenge — bird, tomatoes, oil, a few crayfish — is tradition rather than documented fact. What survived into cookbooks was a formula: browned joints, onion, tomato, mushrooms, a brown sauce, and a lemon garnish, applied to whatever meat the household had. Rabbit was an inexpensive and familiar meat at the time, sold by butchers as well as taken as game. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco is characteristic of that book, published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco's launch: Marion Harris Neil worked the new hydrogenated shortening through a wide range of respectable recipes, so that a French-titled braise would demonstrate the product in company where lard or butter had always been assumed.