Clean and cut the rabbit into pieces; sprinkle with salt, ginger, black pepper and paprica and pour over some vinegar. Heat 1 tablespoonful of dripping; add the slices of rabbit and 1 sliced onion, 2 bay-leaves, a few peppercorns, 2 sprigs of parsley, thyme and a little mace. Cover with hot water and let stew slowly until tender. Thicken the sauce with butter mixed with flour. Let cook and serve hot with apple compote.
A plain braise in the German Hasenpfeffer family, written with the terseness typical of a page-a-day cookbook. Quantities for the rabbit, vinegar and liquid are all left to the cook, so a few decisions have to be made before starting.
- Size and yieldA farmed rabbit runs 2½–3 lb and serves three to four. Cut it into the usual seven pieces: two forelegs, two hind legs, and the saddle in three.
- The vinegar step"Pour over some vinegar" reads as a brief souring rather than a cure, and no time is given. About ½ cup of cider or white wine vinegar with the spices, 1–3 hours in the refrigerator, turning once, is a safe reading; a long soak in straight vinegar tends to pale the meat and coarsen its texture. Pat the pieces dry before they meet the fat or they will steam rather than colour.
- DrippingBeef or pork dripping was a common household fat of the period. Lard, bacon fat or clarified butter all work; a single tablespoon is thin for browning a whole rabbit, so use two.
- "Paprica"In a book of this period the word most likely meant sweet Hungarian paprika rather than the smoked Spanish kind, which would dominate the dish.
- MaceThe lacy outer coat of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than the seed. A blade or two, or about ⅛ teaspoon ground; substitute nutmeg at half the amount if necessary.
- TimingFarmed rabbit is tender at 45–60 minutes of bare simmering; wild rabbit or an older animal may want 1½ hours. The hinge is the heat — a rolling boil tightens the lean loin into strings. Keep it at the barest tremble, and pull the saddle pieces out early if they finish first.
- ThickeningButter mixed with flour is beurre manié: equal weights kneaded cold, about 1 tablespoon each for 2 cups of liquid, whisked in off the boil in small pieces, then simmered a couple of minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- Apple compoteNot a dessert here but the sharp foil to the vinegar and spice — apples cooked down with a little sugar and lemon, served warm alongside. Buttered noodles, spaetzle or boiled potatoes fill out the plate.
Rabbit soured with vinegar and braised with bay, peppercorns and onion stands in here for the everyday German Hasenpfeffer — properly a hare dish — a name that literally means "hare pepper" and points to the peppercorns and, in older culinary usage, to the finishing of the sauce with the animal's blood, a step this version quietly drops in favour of butter and flour. The pairing with apple compote is standard German practice: sharp cooked fruit against dark, sour, gamy meat, the same logic that puts Apfelmus beside potato pancakes and roast pork. Its appearance in a book that assigns one nation to each day of the year says something about how American cooks of the period understood "German" cooking — vinegar, bay, warm spice, and fruit on the side. Rabbit itself needs no explaining; it was cheap, widely sold by butchers, and treated as ordinary meat rather than as game.