Clean and parboil 2 rabbits; then cut into pieces. Sprinkle with flour and fry in hot lard. Remove the rabbits. Add chopped tomato and onion to the sauce; mix with flour; let fry; add the sauce in which the rabbit was cooked, some lemon-juice, ½ teaspoonful of red pepper, parsley and salt to taste. Cook ten minutes; then add the rabbit and simmer five minutes. Serve hot with boiled rice.
A terse daybook entry that assumes you know how to joint a rabbit and can read past a few loose pronouns. The key point is that the parboiling water becomes the sauce, so treat it as stock from the start.
- "The sauce in which the rabbit was cooked"Confusingly, the recipe has just used "the sauce" for the frying fat, but this most likely means the parboiling liquid. Parboil in just enough lightly salted water to cover and keep the liquid; a cup and a half to two cups will be about right for the sauce.
- Rabbit size and yieldTwo farmed rabbits at 2½ to 3 lb each will serve five or six. Joint each into eight pieces: two forelegs, two hind legs, the saddle cut across into three or four, and the ribcage for the pot.
- Wild versus farmedFarmed rabbit is tender and the ten-minute sauce plus five-minute simmer is enough. A wild rabbit, especially an older one, needs 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering in the sauce or it will stay stringy. Judge by whether the meat pulls from the bone.
- "Red pepper"In American books of this period red pepper usually means cayenne. Half a teaspoon across two rabbits is warm but not fierce. If you want the dish to read as Spanish, use a teaspoon or two of sweet pimentón and a pinch of cayenne, and stir the paprika off the heat so it does not scorch and turn bitter.
- The fatLard is the right choice and still easy to buy; olive oil is the alternative, though Spanish kitchens used pork fat as well as oil depending on the region. Either way get it hot enough that the floured pieces brown rather than steam.
- Building the sauceAfter the rabbit comes out, cook the onion until soft before the tomato goes in, then sprinkle in a tablespoon or so of flour and let it fry a minute. Adding the reserved liquid a ladle at a time keeps it smooth.
- Tomato quantityNone is given. Two medium fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped, or about a cup of canned, gives a sauce that coats without becoming soup.
- Lemon and parsleyAdd the lemon juice at the end and taste before committing to more; it is there to lift the sauce, not to dominate it. Chopped flat-leaf parsley is better stirred in off the heat.
Rabbit was everyday meat in Spain, and stewed conejo with tomato, onion, garlic and pimentón remains a standard of country cooking in regions such as Aragón, Valencia and La Mancha, where rice is as often cooked with the rabbit as served beside it. What is characteristic of this book is the format: a page-a-day calendar assigning each date a country, a format that let American housekeepers work through a year of "foreign" dinners without leaving the pantry. The result is a recipe of about seventy words, with the seasoning reduced to lemon, red pepper, parsley and salt — an outline of a Spanish stew filtered through a plain American kitchen rather than a transcription from one.