Hasenpfeffer Supreme

This recipe has been in our family for generations. Generations. My grandfather always repeated the words of sentences that meant something, especially if they meant more than one thing, or two. I had asked him to teach me the recipe more than once, and he had always answered that he would have to teach me fifty recipes, sometimes one hundred, more often back to fifty, before this one, and shake his head, meaning that kids like me didn’t have the time or the patience, What with your texting and your Snapgram and the rest of your kefeffle. He knew he was mis-combining the words, knew what the two applications were and did, and which one was past its teenage expiration date. He was sharper than most, than me, very probably sharper than you.

I asked him to write it down, more than once, which he rarely even refused, just batted the invisible question out of the air like a tenacious and drunken moth. When he finally did, I discovered that it scared me deeply and immediately. My grandfather did things for reasons, always, and when he changed his mind about something, he did that for two reasons and a half. One reason was certainly his age, and one was that all of them, the generations, were finally dead and gone and the recipe was finally and entirely his own. It was written, longhand and with tightly perfect penmanship, on five sheets of heavy, cream-colored paper:

This is a special dish, a dish fit for the Herzog (which is a scary name for a duke or a count or whoever lords it over you because they have an ancestor who fought a dragon or turned back the Turks; think of the opposite of a decent worker and give them an ermine hat, there you are: Herzog). But it’s no German recipe, it’s not Russian, and definitely not French. This is a family treasure. This is true! A rabbit, boneless, stuffed on a farce of mussels and fancies, wrapped and carefully crowned in a delicate pastry. And sauced.

So there are four parts: rabbit, stuffing, pastry, and sauce, not including decorations for the pastry, which I can suggest, but which we can also leave as a space for you, and for your children, who I also leave to you (entirely, despite the better judgment of an older generation). Maybe four parts is already too much for a dish (just like it is too much for a story), but this is not an ordinary dish. Have I said that too many times?

Ordinary dishes make simple sense and don’t really need a recipe at all. Your family’s recipe has its own logic, and the recipe, this recipe, is absolutely necessary. Of course, we should have passed it to your own hands by making it, we should have, but failed you there. I failed. But only because it takes more than a few times making it to know it, and this is for special occasions, and special occasions have been too thinly spaced in our family and should not be forced.

To start:

• One nice 3 or 4 pound rabbit, even one of those ghastly frozen ones, but with the liver and kidneys 

Without the liver and kidneys, it is not really a rabbit and maybe you can stew it to death and have something. My own grandfather (your Twice Great) knew rabbits, may the devil punish him twice, and maybe that’s all he knew. Also, you need the liver and kidneys for the sauce, and if you are not making the sauce, do not make the recipe at all.

It is important to wash the rabbit in cold water and to dry it thoroughly. You will need a cutting board and a sharp knife. If the rabbit has a head, cut it off and throw it away. Put it in a paper bag, not just in the trash, or the next person might get a fright, and the kitchen is no place to be leaping around! Pull out the liver and kidneys with your fingers and keep them safe. The hardest part about boning a rabbit is actually getting all the bones out, so you can make it a little easier by cutting the front legs off and throwing them away too.

The boning knife is the one with the long thin blade in the top drawer, the kind my mother used to carry around in the fold of her knapsack and used to talk about when she was telling everyone she was the lost heir to this and that. Maybe it’s even the same knife, but I don’t think so. Your grandmother was a remarkable woman, but she needed reasons for everything she did, and when she didn’t have them, she found other people’s reasons and made them fit. I think this was when that crazy girl was claiming to be the lost Romanov in the papers and the idea must have appealed to her.

Just use the tip of the knife, like you are tickling the rabbit, and just go tickle tickle tickle, working your way up the ribs towards the backbone. Do it on both sides and take your time. You can get all the ribs and spine out together in one piece if you are careful, and if you hold it in your hand, it makes silly American Halloween seem like nothing at all. Now start on the front of the legs, at the bottom where the feet were, and make a long cut up along the bone. Now tickle tickle tickle again, first going around one side and then the other, open each leg up like a book, until you can get the knife under the bone. Keep working your way up until you get to the pelvis, which is the hardest part, but just be careful—careful!—not to ever try to make too big a cut. These bones won’t stay together like the ribs and all that. You can take all the pieces out separately. That’s how to do it, bit by bit. If we got here at all, that’s how we did it, bit by bit, not running and howling away from every little thing, even though when you have to run, you run.

Season the body with salt and pepper and a little grated nutmeg, and set it to the side.

For the Pastry:

• 2 cups pastry flour
• 2 sticks butter, cut into pieces, softened on the counter
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 2 teaspoons sugar

You could have made the pastry first, but the order isn’t really important. Your great-grandmother said she always made the pastry first, but she always said a lot of things, like how if it had not been for the war, she would have owned acres and acres of grapevines and the house surrounded by them. Sometimes a castle. And sometimes paintings and gold instead of vines and wines. If you want to learn how to make an American pie crust, ask your mother. (But she won’t know; all she wanted to be was an American.)

Add the salt and sugar to the flour and mix with your fingertips, then knead in the butter. Run the faucet until the water is good and hot. Add about six tablespoons, two at a time, kneading it in. When it comes together in a ball, leave it in a bowl, covered. You can use plastic wrap or whatever, but it is always too thin and too strange to feel natural to me.

If you are going to make decorations, I hope you have thought about them, and carefully, by now. If you are going to plan on doing something all at once, it is best to think about it very carefully first and from start to finish, even if it is a terrible idea in the first place. 

For the Stuffing:

• 1 pound mussels or crayfish tails, and it can be either one (It’s not some French thing, not German, not Russian, not even White Russian, so just don’t ask, but fresh. Mussels, crayfish tails, even oysters, but make sure they are fresh!)
• Half a stick of good butter (And if you don’t know what I mean by good butter, stop right here and save us all.)
• A tight bunch of thyme and sweet herbs (By which I am saying parsley, tarragon, marjoram, and it is okay not to know this; “sweet herbs” is an old-fashioned expression, isn’t it?)
• 1 cup of lovely mushrooms (That you went out and picked yourself, after you’ve learned to pick them, and learned about them from someone you trust. Mushrooms can kill you fast or slow!)
• Black pepper (Not so much that you can really taste it. Black pepper is for stews, and don’t give me your translations! I may have given up a language or two, but I haven’t forgotten any words. I know who I am!)
• White wine, dry but sweet (One glass for the dish, one for you, repeat.)
• And something special, like artichoke hearts or capers

The stuffing is the most important part, but so is the pastry, and so is the rabbit. And the sauce is the most important part of all. If you don’t understand these last two instructions, I forgive you, but I will worry about you a little bit. These are the things you have to learn to understand, and not take “this is the most important part” on its face. I learned this the hard way, as did my mother and her father, who could not keep his hands off other people’s rabbits. That is not some sideways joke about sex either (those jokes aren’t as modern as you think!). My mother’s father, your Twice Great, said it wasn’t poaching, but it always came back to a dead rabbit and not some pregnant servant girl that sent him off in the night with two pairs of shoes and nothing to eat. The Herzog, or whoever it really was, never even mentioned the rabbit, just docked the price of it from their fields every week, the same price, as if they had poached fifty rabbits the first year and fifty the next until the fields were empty and someone had left someone else at the bottom of the well, with the devil down there too.

Clean the mussels well and then melt a good knob of butter in a deep skillet, along with some chopped shallot and thyme. Throw in the mussels and give them a shake in the pan, but not so hard as to break the shells. Take a good swallow from your glass of wine and add the rest to the pan, bring to an easy boil and cover, until the mussels open, about five minutes or a little more. Let them cool and remove the flesh with a fork. Curse the ones that don’t open, but don’t blame them (or eat them!). If you use crayfish tails, boil them just barely and then carefully peel them while thinking how much easier it would have been if you’d used mussels or oysters. If it’s oysters, just open them and be done with it.

And as for the mushrooms, they can go as far as your backyard or your pocketbook will allow. Sometimes my mother said it was originally chanterelles, or sometimes morels, or sometimes they all laughed and said it was originally muscaria (deadly! deadly!). But with mushrooms, there is the same amount of folktale and hidden knowledge. You can wash your mushrooms in water for one thing; you don't have to spend all day fussing and wiping with a damp cloth. Just sauté them in a hot pan, with a little oil, salt, and pepper. Not too hot because you don’t want to burn anything as lovely as the delicate oysters edges of the chanterelle; you want to keep the color, like rose gold or good beer, and not too much oil because mushrooms suck it all up and then dump it all back again to no one’s surprise. Ask your mother what I mean.

Chop the shellfish and the mushrooms very roughly, then add the artichoke hearts or whichever piffle you’ve decided on, the sweet herbs that you have already picked off the stems, and some pieces of cold, sweet butter. Add a good pinch of salt (even though I shouldn’t have to tell you this), and you can mix it all together by sort of swishing it back and forth on the cutting board with the side of your knife and bringing it together in a mound. Your Twice Great did it so gracefully, even with his heavy knife and thick hands, not even looking at his work, graceful, like he was conducting an orchestra.

Now divide your dough into two pieces, one a little bigger and one a little smaller, for the decorations. Put some flour down and some on your hands, and roll the larger piece into an oval a little bigger than the dressed rabbit, about the width of two fingers. My two fingers or my mother’s, one of your Twice Great’s fingers, which were thick from hauling all that flour. He wouldn’t have used a rolling pin for this part, or for his flowers, or to tie little snares out of wires, or even to count all the years and kilometers passed. No, he kept those inventories in his head, behind his eyes. Thick fingers, but clever; that’s probably where I get it as well. He said he had tasted it at his own Great’s table, and at the Herzog’s table, but he might have said it came from the Queen of the North Pole.

The Herzog must have had a cook, and a good one, so that’s a maybe, but could he really have carried it with him from the age of twelve or fourteen when he ran away from the Herzog and his gamekeepers? And brought it with him before he even got a job hauling sacks of flour to the pastry shop, before he learned to cook at all? “Not too thin” was what he learned, not like paper or strudel. And that when you make decorations, leaves or flowers or whatever you decide, by thinning out just the edges of the pastry, the flower petals look so thin and delicate. The rest can stay thick and strong.

Of course, your Twice Great couldn’t lie and say he was German when he ran. He spoke German well, as well as Polish and a little Yiddish from the family he played with when he was little, but Germans care too much and would have asked him again and again just exactly where he was from and he didn’t want that. He said he was Russian, but mainly because he thought, for some reason, that they didn’t have rabbits in Russia. He had started to see his poached rabbit leading the gamekeepers after him with a rope and a buggy whip.

No matter how good the stuffing is, or the pastry for that matter, don’t lose the rabbit! There’s enough lost and hidden between trying to be one thing and claiming to be another. Not that there aren’t excellent reasons for running and changing your skin, or changing the lines on the map that you traveled for the ones you did not. Rabbits run, whether from the Herzog’s shotgun or from a wire snare. But if the main course (the rabbit or your Twice Great) makes it across the border from the Herzog to the back field of a turnip farm, or back across the border to Poland or Finland with everything, even the air above screaming and shaking, which is the better? But maybe when you cross an ocean, the rabbit can be a rabbit again, but also can be a fox or a house cat or a hunting dog, and who can blame my mother for her choices? She never set a poaching snare in her life; she just learned how to tell a story and to put it in and take it out of the oven at the right times. 

For the Sauce:

• The liver and the kidneys from the rabbit, soaked in whole milk
• Butter (what you have left over)
• 2 shallots, minced 
• 1 small clove of garlic, smashed with salt and minced
• Pinch of dry thyme
• Pinch of sweet paprika (a big pinch if you’re homesick)
• Pinch of black pepper
• Small pinch of dry lavender (or not, you don’t want it to smell like your mother on her way to a cocktail party)
• 1 teaspoon tomato paste
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 2 tablespoons brandy (it’s brandy, so enjoy it)
• Splash of Madeira (because if you’ve come this far, it’s worth it)
• 2 tablespoons heavy cream
• 3 toasted hazelnuts, chopped fine like the shallot
• Salt (because no one in our family is a fool)

For the teaspoons and tablespoons, I am guessing; no one who can really cook a sauce has ever used or needed a tablespoon. And when you pinch, use my fingers in your mind, not your mother’s, and if you use your Twice Great’s, it will be a bit of a disaster, although he would have used just the tips of his fingers like it was nothing at all.

Put the rabbit liver and kidneys in milk overnight to draw out the blood. I should have said this first, but that is why you read a whole recipe through and also why you would know if you learned the recipe the right way, by living. And it’s a rabbit, not a fish or whatever. Your mother would have made it with a chicken and called it “À La Americaine,” and who knows what she would have used for pastry, but probably something frozen from the supermarket.

My mother, your grandmother, liked to say the rabbit recipe was adapted from a fish recipe, a French fish in puff pastry, from before the revolution (the French one, not the Russian, and not the real one we thought was waiting for us to trot it out). She also said it was passed down in a family of cooks who were serving it to lords. First she changed her father from a poacher and flour hauler to the cook of a lord. Then she changed herself into the lost heiress—whether or not to the same lord’s estates—probably now a splintered ruin or a concrete kolkhoz.

Take the rabbit kidneys out of the milk and rinse them in cold water and throw the milk away. Melt the last of the butter in a sauce pan, and cook the shallot and garlic just to soften them. Add the liver and kidneys (which you have slit in half the long way) and cook them until they have just a bit of color on them. Then add the tomato paste and spices and cook it all together. Now the brandy first, then the Madeira, and tilt the pan so the lovely flames jump across at you, and remember to scrape the bottom of the pan as it burns. The chicken stock should just cover it all. Add the hazelnuts and turn up the heat so it boils, just for a few seconds, and then down again, not to a whisper, but to a simmer, a conversation, for about ten minutes. Add the cream and keep cooking until you think it has just reduced and thickened. You can grind it up in a mortar or, like I know you will, put it in a blender, but then strain it through a rough strainer—like a flour sifter, not a tea strainer or fancy strainer—just to make it smooth without taking too much out of it.

Turn on your oven and let it heat, with patience, again, patience. Never kick the oven. If you kick a dog, it will bite you; if you kick it enough, it won’t, which is a thousand times worse, both for you and the dog. If you kick the little people, they will wait until they get their chance and kick you to death. Your Twice Great said that he held his foot in that oven to get out of the first war. He was lying, of course, but what an idea! The burn was terrible, however he said he got it, toes curled under and welded back to the sole, ankle marbled stiff like vines over a tree in the forest. No worse than what the gamekeeper would have done, really.

Now you bring it all together. Lay the rabbit in the center of your dough, on its back, but arranged nicely like you are putting a favorite doll on a blanket. You pat it full with the stuffing, with your hands, to be gentle and firm. Now brush a little egg wash around the edges of the dough, a finger’s width, and this once it doesn’t matter whose fingers, your Twice Great’s, yours, mine, anyone with hands you can trust. Draw the dough up and pinch it closed, and remember this for when you show it to your own children: don’t pinch too hard or too soft. Sometimes you pinch a baby on its cheeks, or on its belly for no reason at all, but you have to pinch the dough together harder than that. Never pinch a baby as hard as you would pinch that dough! But too softly it won’t stay closed, and not too hard because it will press out too thin between your fingers and that won’t stay closed either. Only now roll it over, so the smooth dough is the top, the rabbit under it, and the stuffing under the rabbit. There you are.

Before you put it in the oven, you have to apply the decorations. You can use a bit of beaten egg to stick them on, and then when you are done, paint it all with more egg, lightened with a touch of milk so it shines. Bake until just golden, then turn around in the even so it colors evenly, and bake until two shades darker, because golden isn't a good color for anything. Maybe it's not even a color at all.

Your Twice Great was proud of the flowers he made, liked to make them tiny and pouted, to show off what he could do. He had never seen a pomegranate in his life, I am sure, but he made those and talked about the little Jewish girl every time he placed one of those ripe globes amid his flowers. (If you don’t know what he meant by that, you either have no imagination or quite a lot of growing up left to do.)

As much as my mother didn’t want to be his daughter, or at least not the daughter of a cook and ex-flour sack lifter and ex-ex-poaching runaway, she worked her flowers in as well. Except her flowers were flat, like icons or Lenin medals or griffins looking east and west on a crown. She never quite claimed it was the “escutcheon of her lost inheritance,” such infinite kefeffle, but again, if you don’t know what she meant by swords and pennants winding and crossing over that sainted rabbit, no one can draw you a picture.

You know how I like to decorate, even if you haven’t seen them enough times in your life and won’t, more than probably. I am done with symbols, done with red banners and righteousness and cutting your hair short to fight in the streets. If I could, I would make it all queens and jacks and diamonds like a game of solitaire, not bankers, bombs, and police—all bloodsuckers and one stupid mistake that changes your name and your country and nothing else at all. Make what you want, but without hammers and fists and sickles and stars and wires and nails and twisted, smoking nonsense that was once a bloodsucking Mercedes. If I have said too much, I am sorry, but the ink is dry.

When I make decorations, I stick to the abstractions. But if I were you, and could learn to be an artist or a scientist or whatever you choose, I would make something for your Twice Great, a little pout of a flower maybe, and something boastful for his daughter, to be our little joke, and anything at all for your mother and myself, who you know, and something new for yourself, a surprise even.

Roll the pastry out thin, and rest it and chill it so it doesn’t twist and turn and try to make its own escape in the heat of the oven. Forget the dragon-slaying Herzog and all of that, the eagles and griffins holding scallop shells and cockenthryce, all looking to the east and west simultaneously from the same body.

If I had the skill, I would make it a rabbit, but a two-headed rabbit, one head at either end, so you never really know whether it is running forwards or backwards, to or away from its destiny.

But the sauce, if you are not going to make the sauce, just don’t make the dish at all.

Love,

Your Grandfather