Stewed Rabbit
Skin and clean nicely; cut into pieces; put a generous piece of butter into a stewpan and brown the rabbit nicely; remove the meat, add one pint of boiling water to the butter, one tablespoonful of flour stirred to a paste in cold water, salt to taste, and a little grated onion; let it boil up and then put in the meat; stew slowly till tender. Serve hot.
A plain brown stew that depends almost entirely on the browning step and on cooking the animal long enough. The recipe assumes a wild rabbit; farmed rabbit behaves differently.
- Wild versus farmedWild rabbit is lean, sinewy and needs 1.5 to 2 hours of slow stewing. Farmed rabbit, which is what most butchers sell, is tender at 45 to 60 minutes and will fall to threads if pushed to the old timing.
- "Skin and clean nicely"Buy it dressed and jointed, or ask for it in seven pieces: two front legs, two hind legs, saddle cut in two, ribcage. Discard nothing except the lungs; the kidneys and liver can go in for the last ten minutes.
- StewpanA heavy lidded pot or Dutch oven, not a modern shallow saucepan. Brown in batches so the pieces sear rather than steam.
- A generous piece of butterAbout 3 tablespoons. Butter alone scorches at browning heat; adding a spoonful of oil, or clarifying the butter first, keeps the fond from turning bitter.
- The pint of boiling waterTwo cups, poured onto the hot butter and scraped so all the browned residue lifts. Stock in place of water improves the sauce considerably, since rabbit is very lean and gives up little fat of its own.
- One tablespoon flourThat thickens two cups of liquid only lightly. Slurry it in cold water as directed and add gradually; if the sauce is thin at the end, reduce it uncovered rather than adding more raw flour.
- Heat levelA bare simmer, lid on, roughly 180 to 200F in the liquid. A hard rolling boil tightens the leg muscles and makes them harder to bring back to tenderness.
- SeasoningThe original gives salt and grated onion and nothing else. Bay, thyme, black pepper and a spoonful of mustard or a splash of cider vinegar at the end are all traditional companions and none of them fight the dish.
- YieldOne rabbit serves three, at a stretch four. Serve over noodles, mashed potato or with bread to take up the gravy.
Rabbit sat in the game chapter of American household books well into the twentieth century because it was hunted rather than bought, and turn-of-the-century cookbooks still expected a cook to be handed a whole animal in its skin. The recipe is essentially the standard brown fricassee method applied to whatever the household had: sear in butter, deglaze with water, thicken with a flour paste, stew until the meat gives. That flexibility is why so many game entries of the period read almost identically whether the subject is rabbit, squirrel or an old bird. Domestic rabbit farming expanded in the United States around and after the First World War, and as the meat became something to purchase rather than shoot, rabbit gradually migrated out of the game section and, in many later books, off the page altogether.