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Roast Rabbit
6 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 3 tablespoons chopped cooked ham, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind, 1/2 teaspoon powdered herbs, 3 chopped mushrooms, three beaten eggs, 1 rabbit, salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste. Beat up eggs, add mushrooms, Crisco, ham, breadcrumbs, parsley, and seasonings, and mix well. Wipe rabbit, and season inside with pepper, salt, and powdered cloves. Lay forcemeat inside rabbit and sew top; skewer head back and legs on each side; roast 1 hour, basting well with melted Crisco. Serve hot with currant jelly sauce.
A lean roast with an egg-bound forcemeat, written when rabbit was butcher's meat and Crisco was the new shortening on every page of the book. Two details need attention: the oven temperature is never stated, and the stuffing is the part that governs the cooking time.
- Oven temperatureThe original assumes the cook knows her range. A moderate oven, 350-375F, is right here; anything hotter dries a rabbit before the forcemeat sets.
- The stuffing sets the donenessAn egg-and-crumb forcemeat sealed inside the body cavity heats slowly. Take the temperature at the centre of the stuffing, not the leg, and look for 165F (the safe figure for any stuffing cooked inside a cavity). The recipe gives no weight; an hour suits a small rabbit of roughly 2 1/2 lb and will be short for anything larger.
- CriscoIntroduced a few years before this book and promoted heavily in it, hence its appearance in both the forcemeat and the basting. Butter, lard or a neutral oil all work; butter browns the outside better.
- Rabbit as sold nowFarmed rabbit comes skinned, headless and often jointed. The instruction to skewer the head back and pin the legs out is meaningless with a modern carcass — simply truss the hind legs together and tie the forelegs against the ribs. Wild rabbit is leaner, tougher and better braised than roasted.
- Basting is not optionalRabbit carries almost no fat. Baste every 10-15 minutes, or lay bacon or thin sheets of pork fat over the back and remove them for the last 15 minutes to colour the meat.
- Powdered herbs and powdered cloves"Powdered herbs" of this period generally meant a dried mixed-herb blend, typically of the thyme, marjoram and savory type; the recipe calls for half a teaspoon. Note that the cloves used to season the cavity are not listed in the ingredients -- a pinch is enough, as clove overwhelms quickly.
- Red pepperThis is cayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A pinch.
- Currant jelly sauceNot given here. A common period treatment is red currant jelly melted into the deglazed pan juices with a spoonful of port or stock, seasoned and strained. Serve it warm, not hot enough to break.
- YieldA stuffed rabbit of about 2 1/2 lb would serve three or four, depending on appetite; the recipe gives no yield.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company brought out in 1911, which is why an all-purpose fat appears in both the forcemeat and the basting where an older cookbook would have said butter or dripping. The dish itself is far older than the shortening: a rabbit boned or left whole, filled with a bread-and-egg forcemeat and roasted, is a fixture of English and American cookery well back into the eighteenth century, and the pairing with currant jelly follows the general rule that lean game-adjacent meats were served with something sweet and sharp. Rabbit was still ordinary butcher's meat in 1915, cheap and unremarkable, and the elaborate trussing described here — head skewered back, legs pinned out — reflects a time when the animal arrived whole and was presented at table looking like itself.}