Clean and cut a rabbit into small pieces and let stew, well seasoned with salt and pepper and cayenne. Add 2 chopped cloves of garlic, 1 chopped green pepper, 1 Spanish onion sliced thin and 2 sliced tomatoes, a pinch of cloves and allspice. Then line a pie-dish with a puff paste; let bake and fill with the rabbit; add 2 chopped hard-boiled eggs and sprinkle with curry-powder. Cover with the paste; brush the top with a beaten egg and let bake until brown. Serve hot.
A stewed-then-baked pie, written for cooks who already knew how long a rabbit takes and how to handle puff paste. The gaps are all in the timings and the pastry work.
- Stew the rabbit first, and long enoughThe recipe never gives a time. A farmed rabbit of about 3 lb needs 45-60 minutes at a bare simmer in just enough water or stock to cover; a wild one can take 90 minutes or more. The meat should pull from the bone before it goes anywhere near pastry, since the second bake only browns the crust.
- Bone it before fillingRabbit is full of small, sharp bones, particularly along the saddle and ribs. Let the pieces cool enough to handle and strip the meat off, returning it to the reduced cooking liquid. The original does not say either way; period rabbit pies were often filled with the pieces still on the bone.
- Reduce the liquidStewed rabbit with two tomatoes and an onion throws a lot of juice. Boil it down until it coats the meat, otherwise the bottom crust turns to paste under the filling.
- "Line a pie-dish with a puff paste; let bake"This is blind baking. Line the dish, prick the base, weight it with beans or pie weights and bake at 425F for about 20 minutes until set and pale gold. Puff pastry shrinks badly if it goes into the oven warm, so chill the lined dish for 30 minutes first.
- Oven and final bakeOnce filled and covered, 400-425F for 25-30 minutes will brown the lid and puff the top. The filling is already cooked, so you are baking pastry, not meat.
- Spanish onionStill sold under that name: a large, mild, sweet yellow onion. A standard yellow onion works but is sharper, so use slightly less.
- Curry-powderSprinkled over the filling rather than cooked into it. Commercial curry powders of the period were probably milder and heavier on turmeric and coriander than many jars today; start with a teaspoon and taste, especially as the cayenne is already in the stew.
- Pastry quantity and yieldRoughly 1 lb of puff pastry covers a 9-inch dish top and bottom. One rabbit fills that pie and serves four to five, with a green vegetable or potatoes.
"Oriental" here means very little geographically and a great deal commercially: in English and American cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the word attached itself to almost any dish carrying curry powder, whose popularity in Britain came out of the East India Company trade and reached the United States as a ready-blended tin on the grocer's shelf. The underlying dish is a plain British rabbit pie, and the garlic, green pepper, tomato, cloves and allspice pull it more toward the Mediterranean and the Caribbean than toward Asia. Rabbit was ordinary food in the period, cheap and widely sold by butchers, and a book organised as a dish a day for a year could lean on it readily. The hard-boiled eggs scattered through the filling are an old and thoroughly English touch, found in raised pies and veal-and-ham pies long before curry powder reached them.