Roast Rabbit
After the rabbit has been thoroughly washed put it in salted water for an hour or more; stuff with bread crumbs and sausage meat, season well with salt and pepper, and a well-beaten egg; stuff and sew up; then put in the roasting pan one onion, one carrot cut up, a few cloves, whole pepper corns, and a bay leaf. Rub well with salt and pepper, and lay upon the dressing, putting bits of butter here and there over the rabbit. Sift little flour over the top, pouring in a little hot water. Cover closely and roast, basting very often. When done, place on a hot platter and garnish with slices of lemon and wine.
A covered, self-basting roast that behaves more like a braise. The original gives no oven temperature, no weight and no time, so the numbers below are the missing scaffolding.
- Oven and timeRoast covered at 325-350F. A 2.5-3 lb farmed rabbit takes about 1.5 hours covered, with the lid off for the last 15-20 minutes to colour the top. Wild rabbit is leaner and older and may want 2 hours or more.
- The stuffing is the limiting factorSausage meat packed inside the body cavity heats far more slowly than the rabbit around it. Take the temperature at the centre of the stuffing, not the meat: it needs 165F. Cooking the stuffing separately in a small dish is the easier route if you would rather not overshoot the rabbit.
- What rabbit to buyFarmed rabbit, sold whole at 2.5-3 lb, is the closest match and is tender enough for roasting. Wild rabbit of unknown age is a stewing animal; if that is what you have, keep it covered the whole time and expect a longer cook.
- The salted-water soakAn hour in salted water was likely aimed at least in part at drawing out blood from a freshly dressed animal, though the recipe does not say. With a modern chilled rabbit it functions as a light brine and is worth keeping — roughly 1/4 cup salt to 2 quarts water, then dry the carcass thoroughly before stuffing.
- Fat mattersRabbit has almost no intramuscular fat, which is why the recipe insists on butter and frequent basting. Laying strips of bacon or fatback over the back and hind legs does the same job more reliably than basting a covered pan.
- Flour and hot waterThis is a gravy in embryo: the sifted flour and the water combine with the rendered butter and the vegetable bed to thicken during roasting. The recipe says only 'a little hot water'; about a cup of hot water or stock suits a covered pan, and much more will simply thin the flour out.
- "Garnish with slices of lemon and wine"Probably compressed wording. The likeliest reading is to ring the platter with lemon slices and finish the pan juices with a splash of wine, reduced briefly before straining and serving.
- YieldOne rabbit with sausage stuffing serves three, four if the meal has other substantial dishes. There is little meat on the forelegs and ribs.
Rabbit sat under "Game" in American household books around 1900, though by then it was drifting toward the category of ordinary meat: hutch rabbits were kept in some towns and cities, and wild cottontail was cheap in season. The treatment here — a bread-and-sausage forcemeat, a bed of onion, carrot, clove, peppercorn and bay, a tightly covered pan — follows the standard European handling of a lean carcass, much as a hare would be dressed, and the sausage does the work that the animal's own fat cannot. The instruction to sew the cavity shut and baste constantly points the same way: this is a cook working against dryness at every step. Rabbit largely fell out of American home cooking after the mid-twentieth century, as poultry became cheap and industrialised, which is why a dish that once needed no explanation now reads as unfamiliar.